Arne Duncan was just a year into his secretaryship of the U.S. department of education in January 2010 when he parachuted into an NCAA annual meeting and laced college sports leaders with a barrage of criticisms for what he saw as their unethical, if not immoral, treatment of college athletes. He said collusion with the NBA on an age restriction set up kids for failure. He said allowing coaches to leave one program in a shambles only to gain a new, more lucrative job elsewhere taught the wrong lesson.
Yet, he was most lathered about college sports officials not following through on their threat to keep teams with lousy graduation rates from picking up extra royalties in the lucrative basketball postseason from the blood and sweat of athletes they promised to educate and reward with college degrees.
By the next NCAA convention a year later, the organization raised its graduation minimums for teams to play in college basketball’s billion-dollar month of tournaments, called March Madness. As a result, in 2013, the Connecticut men’s basketball team, a perennial powerhouse which then was on a run of 11 NCAA tournaments since 1999 with four championships, became the first major school not allowed to play in a tournament because of its failure to graduate players that were bringing it tens of millions of dollars a year.
“To me, that’s the problem that I just always keep coming back to,” Duncan, who in January resigned from President Obama’s Cabinet, told me during a telephone conversation late last month from his Chicago home. “It is that every study shows that if you receive your college degree, that’s worth north of a million dollars in terms of lifetime earnings. That’s transformative.
“If you’re really trying to help a student athlete, the most important thing you can do is get them that piece of paper, have them march across the stage.”
That is sports as social justice.
I called Duncan after seeing in late January that he was named a co-vice chair of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a reform-minded independent panel of influential minds in and around sports in higher education chaired by University of Maryland chancellor emeritus Brit Kirwan. I wanted to know what Duncan, who last month signed a book and speaking contract with L.A.-based Creative Artists Agency, thought he could do for college sports out of government that he couldn’t, or didn’t, do from inside government.
“It’s a way for me . . . to hopefully have an impact in an area that I think has so much potential for good, to be transformative in a positive way,” said Duncan. “Too often [for] the student athlete, their best interests isn’t thought about, they’re taken advantage of.”
Duncan's thought reminded me of the 20-year-old tell-all by the architect of the modern NCAA, Walter Byers, titled "Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes."
But Duncan said he wasn’t ready yet to join the lawsuits aimed at college sports’ inequitable financial structure, or any pay-for-play or unionization efforts surrounding its revenue-generating games of football and men’s basketball. He said his aim was just to make those who run college sports, and get rich doing so, more accountable for what they’re ostensibly working on a college campus for — educating teenagers to become successful young adults. How to do that? Duncan said he wants to change the incentive structure in the game, which currently rewards success on the scoreboard but not so much for the number of mortarboards.
“Very few incentives for coaches, for ADs, for college presidents, that are set by board of directors, have to do with student athletes’ success,” Duncan said. “They all have to do with wins and losses on the field, or on the basketball court. It’s misaligned.
“To totally reward and incentivize adults, be they coaches or ADs, to win, and to put the academic well-being of the student athlete second, or not even close, to me that’s the fundamental crux of the problem that I want to get to.”
Duncan said he was surprised by research his friend Tom McMillen, the former basketball star from Maryland who wound up a Rhodes Scholar and politician, found in analyzing college coaches’ contracts. For most of the contracts, Duncan said, upwards of 95 percent of the pay was tied to athletic performance.
“It’s [college athletics] got to be value based. It can’t be revenue based. And right now revenue is driving everything,” Duncan said.
“And the kids — and let me be very clear — particularly the kids who are disproportionately poor, particularly the kids who are black and brown — and you have to talk about race in this conversation,” he said, “the fact that they are far too often used generally by white men — and I can say that as a white man — there’s something very, very disconcerting about that picture.”
Duncan’s social consciousness is rooted in the South Side of Chicago where his mother, a teacher, ran an after-school tutoring center in a church basement. He spent his after-school time there, too, playing basketball with sons of working-class poor and black families whose best option to a better life appeared to start with sports. Duncan graduated from those blacktops to the Harvard basketball team, four seasons in the USBL and another four in the Australian league.
“If I hadn’t had those opportunities to be a collegiate student athlete, would I have had a chance to lead the Chicago Public Schools, and be the nation’s education secretary?” Duncan asked. “The lessons I learned growing up on the streets, playing in high school and college . . . shaped my life in ways that opened up a world of opportunities. I just want a lot more young men and women — and particularly young men of color who weren’t as fortunate as I was growing up — to have those same kind of life chances.”
The NCAA reported late last year that athletes at the most-prominent programs gained diplomas in the most-recent measuring period at the highest rate ever, 86 percent. It touted reforms over the past decade, including Duncan’s insistence that it punish schools with poor graduation rates for athletes, as factors.
It also pointed to data that black athletes outperformed their peer students by about 10 percent, even though they were graduating at rates less than every other group.
A government count wasn’t as kind on either account.
No matter, Duncan’s concerns weren’t assuaged, particularly by an increased graduation rate for black athletes that was still 30 percentage points less than all athletes.
“There has to be institutional accountability, but the way to change this behavior is financial degradation,” declared Duncan, wondering what the impact would be if coaches were banned from coaching for a year, or life, if they continually failed to uphold the educational mission of the institutions where they worked.
“Many of these coaches and ADs are winning financially, but they’ve absolutely lost the moral high ground, lost their moral authority, lost their stature as the true leaders they could be.
“Are they [athletes] part of the moneymaking machine for adults, or are they there . . . to get that degree?” Duncan asked. “If they get that degree, they can change not only their lives, but change their families’ lives for generations. And if we’re thinking about reducing inequality in our country, a college degree is the ticket, that’s the way to do it.”
Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for the Post.
