Mellon Fund Tackles College Sports
New project focuses on academic requirements for athletes and the role of coaches.
By Welch Suggs

An excerpt from a September 3, 2004 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
 
The controversies may have died down, but the final whistle hasn't blown yet on The Game of Life.
 
William G. Bowen's book on admissions, academics, and sports at elite colleges (Princeton University Press, 2001) and its sequel Reclaiming the Game (Princeton, 2003) have spurred numerous debates and calls for reform at Ivy League institutions and New England's small liberal-arts colleges. Now the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of which he is president, is sponsoring an effort to carry the books' message to other colleges.
 
Or at least two portions of that message -- that colleges ought to ensure that coaches and athletes are integrated into campus life and that athletes ought to be academically representative of other students. The foundation has gathered the presidents of approximately 130 liberal-arts colleges to work on a new effort, the College Sports Project, to ensure that colleges are not cutting corners in the athletes they recruit, or in the experience they give those athletes on campus.
 
The project is unlike anything yet attempted in college athletics. It isn't a league or an association like the NCAA. It isn't a panel issuing recommendations, like the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
 
Instead, it is two working groups of college administrators trying to hammer out plans to fulfill two basic ideals: making sure that coaches and athletics administrators are an integral part of college communities, and making sure that athletes on a campus have the same range of academic credentials as other students.
 
"If you look at college athletics, there's been a drift toward competitiveness, championships, won-lost records," says Robert A. Malekoff, one of the leaders of the project and a former athletics director at the College of Wooster. "We're not going to turn back the clock to 1958, where everybody plays three sports. But what you want to do is shift the culture to a small degree, where you're more closely aligned with the general educational mission of the school."