STANFORD: If we look back a decade, Stanford was part of the Pac-12 and Stanford Athletics was self-supporting. Student-athletes received scholarships, but they couldn’t share in media revenue, profit from their name, image and likeness [NIL], or transfer repeatedly. Now everything has changed. What does this mean for Stanford?
Jon Levin: Stanford Athletics has a distinctive tradition. We compete with Harvard and Princeton in the classroom, and with Texas and Ohio State on the field, and we’re successful. Stanford has the most NCAA championships and the most Directors’ Cups for the best overall athletics results in a year, and we had 59 students and alumni compete last summer in the Paris Olympics.
The changes in college athletics hit us hard, particularly in football and basketball. Of course, the clock isn’t going backward, so now we’ve set ourselves three goals. We want to ensure that even in this new era, Stanford student-athletes are true Stanford students. We want athletics to be financially sustainable and hopefully have strong support from alumni. And we want our athletes and teams to excel.
The goals reinforce one another and they’re important because athletics is part of the fabric of Stanford and part of what makes us different as a university.
What steps does Stanford need to take to reach those goals?
I think of our strategy in two categories. A handful of sports, particularly football and basketball, have changed very dramatically. Next year, schools will be sharing media revenue with players, and many schools recruit transfers intensely. To be successful, we need to recruit students who are outstanding academically and athletically, and to have a competitive NIL program to ensure that they stay and compete for four years. We also need to revitalize support so we have students, alumni, faculty, staff, and members of the local community coming out for games and filling the stands.
Then, we have 33 teams that compete at the highest level, produce Olympic athletes and successful graduates, but don’t generate media revenue. In those sports, we have two challenges. One is travel. We were fortunate to get into the Atlantic Coast Conference, but that means some teams are traveling a lot to the East Coast, so we need to work with other schools to rationalize the schedule. The other challenge is that football revenue used to pay for everything, but that’s no longer the case, so we need to generate philanthropic support for these exceptional programs and student-athletes.
How can Stanford meet the financial challenges?
Our first priority at Stanford is always the university’s core academic functions of research and teaching, and that’s never been more true than right now, when there is so much uncertainty about federal funding. So when we decided to participate along with all the other schools in revenue sharing, we said that we’d generate the funds through philanthropy and by finding incremental revenue opportunities, which is what we’re doing. Ultimately, the path to financial sustainability for all the teams is a combination of media revenue and support from the alumni and friends who love Stanford Athletics.
When did you realize Stanford was singular?
I figured out the academic part of Stanford being singular pretty quickly, but being around Stanford athletes as an undergraduate was also eye-opening. One of the women who lived on my floor during my freshman year had competed for the Canadian national gymnastics team. She had, and still has, a level of intensity that’s amazing. One summer she came to visit me, and we went to the South Amherst Fourth of July fair in Massachusetts. She won every event, and when she lined up for the sack race, it was like she was getting ready for a tumbling run at the Olympics. What a lesson in what it takes to succeed at the very highest level. You see that same intensity in Katie Ledecky [’20], who just spoke at graduation, Andrew Luck [’12, MA ’23], who is now our football general manager, and so many of the student-athletes on campus today. It’s part of what makes Stanford such a special place.
