Speaking to an audience of students, student-athletes, faculty, and administration, Dr. Myles Brand, an alumnus of the Rensselaer Class of 1964, kicked off this year’s Humanities@Rensselaer lecture series with a discussion of ethical questions regarding academics and athletics this past Friday. Though his talk focused mostly on Division I-A schools, he also referenced Division III, in which Rensselaer is a participant, on a number of occasions.
Dr. Brand is currently the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and is distinguished in the areas of philosophy and education. Many of his most notable achievements in education were made while he was president of Indiana University.
The main thrust of Dr. Brand’s speech was the need to more closely integrate athletics into Division I-A institutions, and to promote learning and athletics as one and the same. He believes that separate admissions processes, separate budgeting procedures, and differing sources of revenue create a divide between academia and athletics. Also, he stated that “negative cultural preconceptions” on the part of faculty often contribute to the divide.
According to Brand, professors often seem to classify subjects or teachings into “knowledge that” or “knowledge how.” He believes that the “knowledge how” involved in music is deeply similar to the “knowledge how” involved in sport. He sums this discrepancy up in a single statement: “Faculty aren’t about the body. They are about the mind.”
Much of the value of sports lies in the values promoted by athletics, according to Brand. “Many students would do well to gain this value of resilience,” he stated.
Dr. Brand also touched upon issues of finance and academic fraud. According to the NCAA charter, a Division I-A athletic department should “strive to finance by revenues produced by itself.” Only one-third of schools claim to meet this standard, but Dr. Brand believes that fewer than two-dozen actually do. He thinks that a closer integration of athletic and academic budgets would help foster better relations, and that the NCAA charter is wrong on this issue.
He cited statistics showing that intercollegiate athletes have a six-year graduation rate of 62 percent, while non-athletes graduate at a rate of 59 percent. Dr. Brand did voice concern regarding I-A men’s basketball, because of its extremely low graduation rate, especially among African-Americans. Some Division I-A schools, he claimed, have not graduated a single men’s basketball player in the past five years.
While Dr. Brand’s visit coincided with the Alumni Hall of Fame inductions held last Friday, it was even more timely in that Rensselaer is currently fighting a major NCAA initiative which threatens to shut down its long-standing tradition of Division I hockey. As a Division III school with a special exception for a single sport, Rensselaer finds itself teamed with Johns Hopkins, Clarkson, and other similarly affected schools to fight off the current charter amendment which threatens the single-sport loophole. Dr. Brand expressed his sincere hope that the 300-plus voting members of Division III would see the “wisdom” of keeping things the same, and stated his confidence that the current effort by the Rensselaer administration to block the amendment would succeed.
