Duncan: School must come first
Ex- Education Secretary continues to call for big- time NCAA reform
Arne Duncan remembers as a child sitting around the dinner table as his family discussed sports, though not in the way other families talked about them — more in the context of higher education than higher scoring averages.
“My dad was on the faculty at the University of Chicago and he was the faculty representative to the NCAA for years,” Duncan tells USA TODAY Sports. “He used to come home, and he loved those meetings and we used to have fascinating dinnertime conversations about the proper role of athletics and the studentathlete experience.”
Those things are still on Duncan’s mind as he prepares for his first meeting as co- chair of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. It will be Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, only blocks from the White House where Duncan sometimes played basketball with his boss when Duncan was Secretary of Education under President Obama.
Then, Duncan used the bully pulpit of his office to criticize big- time college athletics. Today, he offers pointed critiques from his lead position on the reform- minded commission.
So what does he think about North Carolina winning the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this month while under investigation for allegations of academic fraud?
“Without commenting on specific allegations at UNC, or anywhere else,” Duncan says, “where athletes are taking sham classes, when they are being passed through to create revenue for the university, when they are not earning college degrees and not being prepared for the real world, it is absolutely abusive and immoral. It makes no sense educationally, and it is morally bankrupt.”
Duncan has been known for that sort of acerbity since he turned heads at an NCAA convention in 2010 with a contentious keynote. “If you can’t graduate two out of five of your players,” he asked then, “what are they doing at your university?”
His harangue offered echoes of a policy long recommended by the Knight Commission. In 2011, the NCAA adopted a policy to move toward barring teams from postseason play if not on track to graduate at least half of their players, according to the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate measurement. And among the first casualties, as the rule was phased in, was traditional basketball power Connecticut, which sat out the 2013 men’s tournament. ( The rule be- came fully effective during the 2015- 16 school year.)
“I remember getting calls from Connecticut senators and congressmen about it,” Duncan says. “Guess what. … Having standards matters.”
That’s the sort of lesson that he says he learned at the family dinner table. Duncan would grow up to play basketball at Harvard, and he praises college sports for producing leaders in the political and corporate worlds. But he criticizes it for an assortment of ills, including player safety and coaching diversity.
Duncan says the Knight Commission will propose at its May meeting that some money from the annual distribu- tion generated by the College Football Playoff be spent on national initiatives addressing the health and safety of players and programs that aim to improve diversity among football coaches.
( Current programs are funded by the NCAA, with revenue largely from the men’s basketball tournament; revenue from the College Football Playoff are managed by the Football Bowl Subdivision conferences independent of the NCAA. Leaders of the Playoff previously agreed to a commission recommendation to award some revenue to institutions based on football teams meeting certain academic standards.)
“Money should be used for things that benefit the players and benefit the sport and not just the folks who win those games,” Duncan says.
The University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport counted 16 head football coaches of color in the FBS in 2016, with nearly 88% of FBS coaches being white.
“The proportion is so wildly out of whack when more than five out of 10 players are black and one in 10 coaches are black,” Duncan says. “We need that pipeline and we need to be intentional about creating it. …
“Folks of color are just systematically denied opportunity. There is no polite way to put that.”
Duncan says he’s pleased his place on the commission allows him to work on many of the issues he believed in as Secretary of Education.
“I loved every second of the work in D. C.,” he says. “It was the privilege of a lifetime.”
The commission has roots to the late 1980s. Many of the issues that existed then remain intractable today.
“The pace of change in college sports has been much too slow,” Duncan says. “It should not take decades.”
Agents of change, he says, should not be limited to college presidents and athletics directors.
“To be clear,” Duncan says, “this is really going to be about boards of universities and boards of directors who set policy.”