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American Morning
Report Suggests Reform of Collegiate Athletic Programs
Aired June 26, 2001 - 11:40 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: We're going to turn to Jeanne Meserve, who's going to help us out. I was going to do that. Save the day and raise the bar for us, Jeanne, good morning.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Daryn, I'll try. Good morning to you. On a street corner across from Madison Square Garden, an example of the commercialization of college sports: a billboard touting University of Oregon quarterback Joey Harrington as a contender for the Heisman Trophy. It cost a quarter of a million dollars.
A new report from the Knight Commission on intercollegiate athletics deplores such expenditures, and it says many colleges and universities routinely ignore the rules that govern competition, and quote, "beyond the breaking of the rules," the report says, "is the breaking of the university's covenant with all students, athletes included, to educate them."
William Friday is co-chairman of the Knight Commission and president emeritus of the University of North Carolina and joins me here today. Thanks a lot for coming in.
WILLIAM FRIDAY, KNIGHT FOUNDATION: Good to see you.
MESERVE: This report talks of a disgraceful environment in college athletics. What are you talking about?
FRIDAY: We're talking about the movement away from what used to be viewed as the amateur style of play in college sports, so much money flowing in it, the failure of graduation rate requirements; many things like this that go on in and around college sports are readily out of control.
MESERVE: What is wrong with the infusion of money into college sports?
FRIDAY: Well, it begins to dominate things. Universities will schedule games in response to network television's demand, not that they want to play at 9:00 at night, but you get schedules so you play to make the income.
MESERVE: But why is that a problem?
FRIDAY: Because I think it disrupts the college life that surrounds the young person, and the first rule that we must always is that these young people come as student athletes now. We're not farm clubs. We're not in the entertainment industry, although I admit it's that way now, and I acknowledge as do all members of this commission, that we in our own way have been a party to bringing on what we are pointing out here now in some ways in years past. But it must be dealt with.
MESERVE: Are many of those athletes not students? What do the graduation rates looks like?
FRIDAY: Well, the graduation rates are not by any means what they ought to be, and in some instances in the immediate past, we've had institutions that graduated fewer than 40 percent, fewer than 35 percent in football and basketball.
MESERVE: And I think that you told me that there was one school that didn't graduate one African-American a basketball player.
FRIDAY: Some of the teams have not graduated African-Americans and this is not right because we -- we bring these people to those campuses and we use their talents, so of speak, but we're not seeing to it that they get education, and the reason this is so important is only one out of every 100 that plays college sports make a living at it once the time span is used up.
MESERVE: Now, there was a report 10 years ago, you suggested reform, some of them were instituted; what do we do now? What's the answer.
FRIDAY: We're going to create another mechanism, a new and additional one that will bring presidents, trustees, the NCAA and people who are directly responsible for college sports together, and they sit around the table and talk, and put these problems up on top of the tables and what are we going to do about them. They will require conference actions, This is not something a president can do alone. He'd make a fatal mistake if he did, but some of us have tried.
Here is a community problem, and we are doing the wrong things now and saying the wrong things to young people. We've got to get back to processing athletes, student athletes the same way we do all others, the same graduation requirements, the same course requirements; you know what I'm talking about.
MESERVE: It may be hard to do it with the money involved, but thank you so much for joining us. William Friday, former president of the University of North Carolina.
FRIDAY: Thank you.
MESERVE: And Daryn, now back to you in Atlanta.
KAGAN: Jeanne, thank you.
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