No Penalty for Scholar-Athletes

FROM WATCHING the National Collegiate Athletic Association's television commercials during football games, you wouldn't know anything is wrong. "America's energy is mindpower," the ads tout, celebrating the happy and flourishing union of athletics and academics. But the actual state of the NCAA reveals a considerably different picture.

The high-pressure, big money environment of college football has produced a long series of recruiting violations, an atrociously low percentage of athletes who actually receive degrees, a pattern of falsified grade transcripts to allow athletes to maintain eligibility, and a host of other problems. So what was the NCAA's response last week to this growing list of disgraces? The group turned to its Ivy League members--which come closest to joining education and sport in a mutually beneficial alliance--and threw them out of the game's top division.

The Ivies were evicted to give complete control of Division 1-A to the College Football Association, a splinter group including 61 of the nation's most powerful football schools. The top dogs in college football--concerned above all with controlling the game's multi-million-dollar television contract--will no longer be at all accountable to universities that place football in its correct perspective in campus life. With this concession to the professionalism already rampant in the sport, the NCAA will likely deemphasize the regulation and enforcement of recruiting violations and other transgressions.

In practical terms, the removal of the Ivy League schools might not mean much to Harvard; the Ivies' financial arrangements with the NCAA will remain the same, at least in the near future, and the loss in prestige should not make much difference for universities whose reputations seem pretty secure. The worst casualties are these--the game of college football, which slides further away from its professed goals, and the big-time players, who will continue to be treated not as students but as revenue-producing commodities by the men who run the college game.

Though reinstatement for the Ivy League is unlikely, because the schools which voted the schools out would have to vote them back in, the NCAA Division 1-A would be wise to return them to the game's top rank. Student-athletes everywhere deserve better than to see the abandonment of the tradition of sports as a supplement to education--not a substitute for it.