April 5, 2004
Sitting Out the Scandals
By Michael H. Granof
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Editor's Note: This opinion piece first appeared in the April 5, 2004 edition of The New York Times.
AUSTIN, Tex. — Tonight's championship game should settle the question of which college basketball team is best. The debate will continue, however, over how to salvage the tarnished reputation of college sports.
One way to reform the system is to apply the lessons of Enron and Arthur Andersen to collegiate athletics. When a university's athletic program is engulfed in scandal, as has been the case recently at Colorado, St. John's and other universities, more than the coaches and players should be held responsible. So should the university's president.
As a consequence of Enron and the other corporate debacles, in 2002 Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This law applies only to publicly traded companies, but countless privately held businesses and not-for-profit organizations have voluntarily adopted its provisions. And though the law pertains mainly to financial reporting, its principles can be adapted to other organizational practices.
The key to the law is accountability. Directors and senior executives must be answerable for what goes on in their organizations. The usual defense of being oblivious is no longer acceptable: senior executives must not only certify to the accuracy of their firm's financial statements, but they must also show that a system is in place to track and control costs.
Big-time athletic programs are often the most visible and high-risk activities of a university. Whether the president of a scandal-ridden college actually knows about any charges of rule violations is beside the point. He should know. Basketball and football programs, after all, are more likely to embarrass a university than its art history department.
Athletic programs are governed mainly by the regulations of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the body that oversees intercollegiate athletics. Ensuring that universities abide by the N.C.A.A.'s rules and policies is not much different from making sure corporations follow generally accepted accounting principles. In both cases, appropriate reporting and monitoring procedures should be in place. And university presidents should have to certify that athletic programs are in compliance with all applicable rules. If university presidents knew their jobs were on the line, they might be expected to institute the same types of reforms that corporate executives did when faced with the Sarbanes-Oxley law.
And while adherence to N.C.A.A. decrees may be a necessary condition to ensure a clean athletic program, it is hardly sufficient. The rules, for example, contain no specific requirement that athletes and coaches conform to the norms of civilized society. Universities must therefore establish their own policies as to what constitutes suitable behavior on the part of players and coaches.
As with corporations, ultimate responsibility in a university rests, in theory at least, with the chief executive — the university president. At too many universities, however, presidents have little control over athletics; at least unofficially, the athletic director reports only to the board of trustees. Unfortunately, absent a major controversy, these boards are too often more concerned with winning seasons and bowl appearances than with the overall integrity of their athletic programs. That has to change.
To be sure, universities differ from corporations in that their employees — faculty members — have a strong role in shaping policy. Faculty members should realize that what happens on the playing field affects what transpires in the classroom. If they want to share in governance, then they must share in responsibility. They too must help ensure compliance.
Athletic and other university administrators can be counted on to claim that any additional reports, internal controls and certifications will be costly and simply add to their bureaucratic burdens. In that regard, they will be no different than many of their corporate counterparts. But the leaders of many well-run corporations now say that the Sarbanes-Oxley law has required them to do little that they weren't doing already. Presidents of well-managed universities are likely to say the same.
Businesslike controls will not, of course, cure all the ills of college athletics. They will not stem the tide of commercialization or guarantee academic integrity any more than Congressional legislation or improved accounting systems can eliminate corporate greed. They may, however, increase the likelihood that future controversies in college sports are about what happens in the games themselves.
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