In Top 25 Programs, Presidents Lack Clear Oversight of Sports
Fed up with scandals at Pennsylvania State University and in other big-time athletic departments, college presidents have pushed for more control over NCAA decisions during the past year. But on their own campuses, many presidents lack clear authority over sports, a Chronicle analysis has found.
Of the presidents or chancellors who oversee the 25 biggest athletic departments, not a single one has contract language related to oversight of athletics. That includes Rodney A. Erickson, who was named president of Penn State following a breakdown in university leadership during the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal. Employment agreements for top officials at Ohio State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which have both faced major NCAA sanctions in the past year, do not spell out any specific powers.
More common in presidential contracts, The Chronicle found, were specific goals for fund raising and financial management. If athletics was mentioned at all, it was to spell out perks the presidents would receive, such as free lifetime tickets to games.
Campus chiefs are held accountable for sports in various ways, including through individual performance reviews or their institutions’ accreditation processes. But contract provisions are one of the measures governing boards use to assess presidential performance.
Governance experts say boards should do a better job of spelling out their leaders’ athletics responsibilities to protect institutions from conflicts with boosters and outside parties, and to guard against potential fallout from scandal.
Raymond D. Cotton, a higher-education lawyer who specializes in governance issues, believes trustees themselves should be more engaged in conversations about sports, and thinks they should revise presidential agreements to include specific language about athletics oversight: “It’s a responsibility we all have in a post-Penn State world.”
Among the highlights from The Chronicle‘s analysis:
* Some presidents believe their contracts should include more specific language about athletics oversight. “If you’re supposed to be paying attention to X, you’ve got a very strong incentive to pay attention to X because you want to keep your job,” said Ed Ray, president of Oregon State University, who has led the NCAA’s Executive Committee the past two years. “If that language isn’t there, it’s of your own volition whether you pay attention to something or not.”
* One president told The Chronicle he wouldn’t want detailed language about athletics in his contract because he doesn’t want to be held responsible for the behavior of students or others who are beyond his control.
* Legal experts say there could be downsides to clarifying leaders’ responsibilities. If institutions start spelling out specific duties and fail to name certain ones, that can get them in trouble, says Josephine R. (Jo) Potuto, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and former chair of the NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions.
“A bad actor might say, ‘Here’s the list of things I’m supposed to do. You put this list together, and you didn’t say this. I don’t know who you wanted to do it but it wasn’t I,’” she said.
* Several campus chiefs suggested spelling out responsibilities in a less formal document, such as a “position responsibility statement” that must be reviewed annually by a board. That is what Betsy Hoffman, a professor of economics at Iowa State University and president emerita of the University of Colorado System, has done with deans and other people with whom she has worked.
In such a statement, she says, the board should name presidents or chancellors as the ultimate authority for maintaining a “safe” athletics program with “high integrity.” The document should give leaders the authority to hire and fire coaches and athletics officials to ensure the integrity of the department, she says.
And presidents or chancellors should be required to report any problems to the board. “It’s always assumed that presidents will do that, but maybe it needs to be spelled out,” she says.
The full story is available here.
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