By Stephen Collins '74

The book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, published a year ago, set off alarms about advantages that varsity athletes--particularly recruited athletes--are given in their admission to selective colleges and universities, as well as concerns about how athletes perform academically compared with college students at large.

Further, in their "key empirical findings," authors William G. Bowen and James L. Shulman observe that "Athletes competing on intercollegiate teams constitute a sizable share of the undergraduate student population at many selective colleges and universities, and especially at coed liberal arts colleges and Ivy League institutions." At the University of Michigan, a sports powerhouse, for example, three percent of undergraduates compete on 21 intercollegiate athletics teams. In one recent and typical class at Colby, 46 percent of the men and 35 percent of the women played on 32 different varsity teams.

That issue of numbers, coupled with Bowen and Shulman's study of the social and educational impact of athletics on college life, prompted the presidents of the 11 schools in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) to commission a study of athletics at their own institutions--a study that Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, undertook last year.

In October the NESCAC presidents jointly announced their intention to examine their intercollegiate athletic programs to ensure that they remain consistent with the founding principles of the conference--that intercollegiate athletics are in harmony with educational purposes and that competing players are representative of the student body and full participants in the life of the colleges, for example.

"We believe that the follow-up study of NESCAC raises concerns regarding the ways in which student athletes are recruited to our campuses and how their academic progress is affected by their athletic commitments," the NESCAC presidents' statement said. "While we admire the achievements and talents of our student athletes and reaffirm the educational value of athletic competition, we are concerned that the competitive pressures of intercollegiate athletics, within our conference and beyond it, risk distorting the place and purposes of athletic participation in our institutions."

First and foremost, President William D. Adams acknowledged the power and the value of athletics at an institution dedicated to learning, and he praised the broad contributions of athletes in and out of classrooms. "It's very obvious that significant and wonderful things happen in those [athletic] programs," he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in October. "Kids learn a lot, and the kinds of things they learn are what we want them to be learning."

Adams, who currently is chair of the NESCAC, characterized the new study and the presidents' examination of the role of athletics as a pursuit of balance: "My concern is that the sense of balance is being lost, and I think you've got to be concerned." The Bowen research shows clear contrasts between the walk-on players of earlier generations and specialized, recruited athletes who make up a growing percentage of teams at all collegiate levels.

Specifically, the NESCAC presidents agreed to explore a number of areas, including recruitment and admissions standards and practices, resources committed to athletics, conference rules and procedures and regulatory framework issues such as the structure of the conference and Division III of the NCAA.

Adams said the process at Colby, and throughout the NESCAC, is to be consultative, and it will include athletic administrators, student athletes, coaches, faculty, alumni and trustees.

The NESCAC, formed in 1971, includes Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity and Williams colleges as well as Tufts and Wesleyan universities. The conference competes in Division III of the NCAA and, as such, the schools cannot give athletic merit scholarships.

The conference's mission states that, in all sports, primary emphasis is on in-season competition, that fixed starting and ending dates for each season are set and the number of contests is limited. Post-season play is to be managed in a way that minimizes conflicts with classes and exams.

Those restrictions notwithstanding, the nature of athletics in America, from youth leagues up through professional sports, has far-reaching effects on the shape of campus life at the NESCAC schools. The study of what those effects are "ought to lead us to a series of reflections on our practices with respect to possible areas of reform," Adams said.