College presidents hold fate of football season in their hands
Few people in higher education are as qualified to assess the cross-currents pulling college football into different ideological camps amid the COVID-19 pandemic as Harris Pastides.
Not only was Pastides the president of the Southeastern Conference while leading the University of South Carolina, he chaired the NCAA's Division I Board of Directors and sat on the Board of Governors, meaning he was heavily involved in just about every major college sports decision of the past half-decade.
Now, he's a professor emeritus of epidemiology and biostatistics at South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health, meaning his retirement last summer came shortly before his interest in college sports and his lifelong academic work would have converged. It's a situation he doesn't envy being in the middle of.
“It's always lonely at the top,” Pastides said, characterizing the uniquely difficult moment his former presidential colleagues now find themselves in. “Even if you lead through consensus and all the people around you are advising you and saying, `You're good to go, let's open,' if there's a mistake it's always you who has to take the fall.”
That weight of responsibility now sits squarely in the middle of a see-saw that college presidents have been riding for nearly six months, with college football skirting the edge of staying on board or falling off completely.
Most of the college football universe, led by the NCAA's lower divisions, made a relatively early decision that it wasn't worth the risk or the trouble to try and play this fall. Among the higher-profile schools, the Big Ten and Pac 12 came to the same conclusion earlier this month along with the Mountain West and Mid-American Conference, leaving the other six Football Bowl Subdivision leagues to press on.
The inconsistent patchwork of decisions and divergent risk assessments from conference to conference and school to school has confused and angered people on both sides of the debate. But it has also highlighted the various pressure points being applied to the college presidents at the big-time football schools who actually have to make the call.
“I feel for these folks,” said Holden Thorp, who served as the University of North Carolina's chancellor from 2008 to '13 and is now the editor in chief of the Science family of journals. “They're getting up at 6 a.m. and getting on Zoom calls and not getting off until 10 p.m. They're exhausted, and every time they get a plan together, they have to go around and try to get everyone on board with it and there's always some constituency that won't get on board and it turns the merrygo-round on again. They're under tremendous pressure.”
Thorp understands how issues related to athletics can generate outsized pressure on a university president, the vast majority of which do not have a background in sports. Though Thorp rose to the presidency on the strength of his career as a chemistry professor and dean of UNC's College of Arts and Sciences, he resigned in 2013 largely because a football scandal had overwhelmed his tenure.
Even for someone who had been deemed successful in managing other areas of the university, having a highprofile football program on campus can invite a level of peril and scrutiny that simply doesn't apply to issues involving the medical school or the history department. And that can get very complicated during a pandemic, as schools are struggling with everything from how to manage on-campus learning to millions in lost revenue from simple things like food service.
As Thorp pointed out, a school like the University of Michigan has far more to worry about in maintaining $1.62 billion in research expenditures and nearly $5 billion in revenue for its medical center versus a $187 million athletic budget.
“There are a number of presidents and chancellors that, right now, college athletics and maybe specifically college football is a pain in the ass,” said Jim Livengood, a longtime Division I athletics director at multiple FBS schools who is now a consultant in the college administration space.
“It's not that they don't like college football or don't understand what it can mean for the university, but in terms of the underlying of what they're trying to do in a setting of higher education, in a lot of ways it conflicts with what's going on. I think college presidents are incredibly conflicted, and they're getting input from lots of different sources from regions and trustees, boosters and fans, faculty and staff. Everybody's got a dog in the fight.”
Inevitably, one of those dogs will closely resemble either an elephant or a donkey. It has not gone unnoticed that the Pac-12 schools span six states, five of which have majority Democratic governors.
Across the Big Ten states, there are six Democrats and five Republican governors. Meanwhile, President Trump has consistently tweeted his support for a college football season.
When asked what separates the thinking of the leagues that postponed from the ACC, SEC and Big 12 — territory that generally leans more conservative — Thorp said it was clear to him that political pressures were weighing on those presidents starting from the White House and filtering down to university system governing boards, which are largely run by political appointees.
“It's very easy for the people on the campus to say the president should just stand up to these trustees who insist that we open or insist that we play football, but those are your bosses,” Thorp said.