If the yell leaders ever give up their megaphones, Ted Leland could take over—single-handedly.
“This is a great job,” the athletics director crows. “I used to tell [former vice provost for student affairs] Jim Montoya, ‘Hey, on one of those days when you’ve been sued by five undergraduates, just come on down here if you want to feel better. Because we’ve got a lot of well-adjusted kids who love Stanford and love competing. It’s a happy group down here.’”
At a time when college athletics are under attack from a number of critics, Leland, PhD ’83, is one happy, soda-can-tab-popping guy, with a grin that could light Sunken Diamond—maybe even the Stadium. He recently accepted Stanford’s seventh consecutive Sears Directors’ Cup, awarded annually to the school with the best overall sports program nationwide.
“Do I go into the locker room before a game and yell at the athletes, ‘Let’s win one for the Sears Cup?’” Leland asks. “No. Our athletes compete for each other, so it’s not a motivational tool. But if they’re going to give a trophy, we might as well try to win it. And John Hennessy would probably fire me if we didn’t win it.”
When he’s asked about a report, 10 years in the making, that was issued in July by the Knight Foundation’s Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, Leland doesn’t hem and haw in search of a diplomatic response. “I’m not a big fan of it,” he says. “Ten years ago, the Knight Foundation put out a very worthwhile report that got people thinking, but this latest report is not nearly as rigorous or as compelling. And I don’t think the solutions they’re presenting ring nearly as true.”
The Knight Commission, composed of college presidents, policy-makers and other experts, sees one overriding crisis in college athletics: the emphasis on revenue over academics. The report cites several examples of “prevailing money madness,” including a 250 percent increase in capital expenditures at Division I schools, a college that spent more money hiring a football coach than five department heads combined, and CBS’s $6.2 billion, 11-year contract with the NCAA for broadcast rights. In addition to calling for shorter playing and practice seasons, the commission advocates giving athletes scholarships for four years rather than one year at a time, reducing the number of scholarships for football players, removing corporate logos from player uniforms (Stanford renewed its contract with Nike in August) and ensuring that federal gender-equity standards are taken seriously.
But the charge that appears to bug Leland the most calls on schools to “mainstream” athletes into the university community by putting them through the same admissions and counseling processes as all students. It echoes a key finding of The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 2001), a study of alumni of Stanford and 29 other selective colleges and universities by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University. Shulman and Bowen discovered a disconcerting “separate athlete culture,” in which student-athletes cluster in certain majors, perform less well than their SAT scores would predict and ultimately “disidentify with academics.”
“There may be a slight separate athletic culture, in some ways, but I don’t think it’s anti-intellectual in nature—that’s hogwash,” Leland says. “And I think some of [the book’s] statistics and conclusions, particularly the conclusion that the athletes’ credentials look significantly different from the rest of the student body, are erroneous. There’s no test for statistical significance anywhere in the book, so I think [the authors] probably would have flunked their MA degrees at Stanford.”
Leland, who examined many a standard deviation in his doctoral dissertation on sports psychology, knows Stanford’s academic demands firsthand. He will tell you that athletes have made up only about 10 percent of the entering class for the past five years—less than half the proportion of Princeton’s freshmen. And he will also tell you that football coach Tyrone Willingham starts with a list of 400 players he’d like to recruit and winnows that down to between 30 and 40 candidates he thinks have the needed academic standing. “And probably 20 of those 40 students get in,” Leland adds. “So we tell kids, ‘You have to do both—academics and athletics. And if you just want to do your sport, there are lots of places where you’re going to be happier.’”
NCAA statistics bear that out. Freshman male athletes who entered Stanford between 1994 and 1997 averaged 1,215 on the SAT—218 points above the average for Division I schools. Female athletes averaged 1,151—144 above the national average. (While Stanford does not release the average composite SAT scores of its freshmen, 72 percent of the Class of 2004 scored above 700 on the verbal portion of the SAT and 76 percent did so on the math portion.) Stanford has been called the “Duke of the West,” in reference to both schools’ ability to maintain top-flight academics and athletics—including marquee basketball programs. But freshman basketball players who entered Stanford between 1994 and 1997 averaged 1,123 on the SAT. At Duke, they averaged 968.
Still, don’t ask Leland for the secret of his success. He’s sick of the question.
“We have one of the highest graduation rates and we’ve been scandal-free,” Leland says. “But we have no interest in pushing our system on anybody, and I have no interest in being the apostle for the Stanford model. What we tell people is that it seems to work for us, although we struggle with it every day.”
