Reply to My Critics

By William C. Dowling

Fourteen members of something called the Academic Oversight Committee for Intercollegiate Athletics last week professed themselves to be "horrified" by a Sports Illustrated article in which I supposedly called Rutgers football players morons. (Commentary, Daily Targum, Sept. 18)

I called no football player, on Rutgers or any other team, a moron.

My Sports Illustrated remark was about booster subculture. It's a disgraceful fact that boosters at Division IA schools care nothing about students at their universities who are brilliant at Greek or philosophy or physics. They invariably go into ecstasies, though, when some low-SAT recruit is enticed to their campus to perform on a team.

My remark is there in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated, in its original context, for anyone who wants to read it. It happens to be true. It is something I can back up in detail with tables of the SAT scores of football players at Div IA schools. I also have files overflowing with posts from Rutgers sports boards in which Scarlet R members go crazy over this or that low-SAT recruit who has mentioned the bare possibility of signing to play for Rutgers.

Luckily for me, an example occurred just when the Sports Illustrated article appeared. One Nate Robinson, a lineman highly ranked in SuperPrep, had earlier signed to play for the University of Miami. It turned out that he was unable to make even the dismally low 820 SAT score Miami requires for football players. So he came to Rutgers instead.

The boosters went into a frenzy of rejoicing. And so, presumably, did the members of the "Academic Oversight Committee": Robert Boikess, Roger Cohen, Emmet Dennis, Gus Friedrich, Jim Hughes, Arnold Hyndman, Harry Janes, Robert Jenkins, Pat Mayer, Jeff Rubin, Tom Stephens, John Worobey, and Kathryn Uhrich, and Carl Kirschner.*

Could we be serious for a second? Nate Robinson's combined SAT score was 800. A student with an 800 SAT might be able to do the work at Rutgers if he spent every available moment of his time on his course work. It would be hard. Even putting in 60 hours a week studying, it would be a tremendous struggle for such an individual to keep up with his better-prepared classmates.

Maybe, just maybe, it could be done. But it's brutally dishonest to pretend it can be done by an 800-SAT freshman who's made to put in 40-50 hours a week on developing his physical skills, and then go on frequent weekend trips away from campus. Even a top student who'd entered Rutgers with a 1400 SAT would have a hard enough time keeping up a decent GPA under that regimen.

Nate Robinson is not the miscreant here. He's just a pawn in the sleazy game of commercialized college athletics, viz.

• the coaches who will tell any lie to get a recruit;
• the administrators who are happy to perform as lackeys of the Athletics Department;
• the campus newspaper sportswriters and local sports columnists who serve as its PR shills;
• the boosters who supply slush fund money to attract any "blue chip" prospect who might make them feel more important by "getting us a winner" (see the recent Fab Five case, in which basketball players were paid nearly a million dollars to play for Michigan); and
• the TV networks who rake in billions of dollars by getting institutions of higher learning to prostitute themselves to commercialized athletics.

There was one constituency at Rutgers I assumed to be untouched by the sleaze. It's the faculty, whose allegiance to academic and intellectual values I thought must be guaranteed by their own lives of teaching and research.

I knew that at sports factory schools like Miami and Ohio State and Tennessee there were faculty only too willing, in exchange for a bit of stroking by the AD and the boosters, to serve as sycophants of the Athletics Department. But I did not think that they existed at my own university.

The signatories of the Targum letter to which I'm responding accuse me of having made what would have been, had I actually made it, a controversial remark.

Since I made no such remark then, let me make one now. It seems to me that any member of the Rutgers faculty who steps eagerly forward to parade an "outraged" sanctimoniousness when someone says a word against commercialized athletics at their university lacks any sense of personal shame, and any idea at all of what an institution of higher learning ought to be.

William C. Dowling is a Professor of English 

* To see the special token of recognition given Carl Kirschner for his services to the Rutgers Athletics Department, click here on Rutgers No. 1.