Big-Time Sports: An Interview with Sanford School Professor Charles T. Clotfelter

Charles T. Clotfelter is the Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy Studies and Professor of Economics and Law at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Philanthropy and Voluntarism and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the author of several books, most recently Big-Time Sports in American Universities (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton University Press, 2004). He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University and a BA in history from Duke University. 

What has led to the transition of college athletics into big-time, revenue building sports entities?

It has actually been this way for 80 or 90 years. You look at some of the crowds for football games—even at your institution, the University of Chicago—you can probably go back to 1905 or 1912. There is more money today. That’s really the big change. College sports were really big back when Michigan was playing the University of Chicago. There is a national report about college athletics published in 1929 by the Carnegie Foundation. It documents everything going on today, except the money. They didn’t have TV. That is probably the single biggest contributor.

Give us a sense of the abuses committed by universities in the realm of big-time sports.

They range from quiet compromises in academics to outright cheating. They go across the board. Most universities don’t appear to cheat. All universities that have commercial sports under their umbrella compromise their academic standards.

What else happens?

Some of these cheating scandals have come up at our neighboring institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Football and basketball players were not only taking easy courses, which is something that you see often, but they were also getting more help than the rules permit. Some of these courses were sham courses. You don’t really want to see that anywhere.

Reform groups defend big-time sports by saying that these universities are too weak to resist commercialism. Why might this be true?

I don’t think they are so weak. I believe universities are fine with what is going on now. It is more important that they claim to do well in sports. That’s the reason they don’t stop doing it. These are smart institutions. They have plenty of muscle.

The University of Chicago is what I call the exception that proves the rule. It is very rare for an American university with big-time sports to step back and not do it in an all-out way. Really, only two universities that were big in 1920 and stayed national universities other than the Ivy League schools were Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Chicago. Seven of the current Ivy League schools were also in the top 100 football powers in 1920. They joined the Ivy League, and they then took a step back.

You have said that reforming college athletics would need to begin in the trustees’ boardrooms. What might be accomplished here to address abuses?

In the boardroom, anything is possible. One thing that a board might decide is that we don’t want to have athletic scholarships and we want to only have scholarships that are based on merit—something like the University of Chicago these days. That could be done. It could be done at the next trustee meeting. Pretty much all things are possible, except the trustees can’t decide to have a national championship. That takes a lot of work and money. Trustees usually meet four times per year, so they have four chances to decide to get out of this business. But they don’t do it.

In 1939, the President of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, succeeded in getting the board of trustees to drop out of what was then the equivalent of the Big Ten Conference and stop playing big-time sports. Even though he was making this point in national publications, he was not able to garner support from trustees until the football team had some bad seasons. During the 1939 season, I believe they were shut out by one team 85 to nothing; another outing was 50 to nothing. They were beaten by Michigan. They were beaten by Virginia. Just look at Chicago’s 1939 season record. That will make your eyes water.

So the conditions were ripe for the board to honor Hutchins’ suggestion.  

Right, there need to be two conditions for change. The first is a college president who makes it clear that he does not like sports, but that does not happen these days. That kind of thing will get you fired. The second is a team that is doing horribly. Those are the perfect conditions for getting rid of abuses.

NCAA by-laws stipulate that student athletes may not receive compensation, even though schools benefit enormously from what these student athletes do on the basketball court or football field. Why is this an issue?

Researchers have estimated the marginal revenue product of an additional player on your football team who is going to eventually be drafted by the NFL. For each of those, it is a half-million dollars. In basketball, the number is $1.6 million. That is what the university gets by having just one more of these star recruits. Now look at what the student athletes get. There is going to be an inequality in the middle of those two numbers.

Some folks would say that not paying student athletes preserves the amateur status of college sports.

One of the points that Taylor Branch has made in The Atlantic on “The Shame of College Sports” is that amateur status is not something you foist onto people. I think that is a nice way of putting it. You are not giving these student athletes a choice. In tennis or golf, you can choose to be an amateur or a professional. But making them have no choice but to be an amateur is not the same thing.

Photo credit: Archival Photographic Files, apf4-00661, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library