The Free Riders

The scandals dredged up in the college basketball fix investigation (TIME, Feb. 26 et seq.) prompted the New York Times to take a long (20 columns) look at "the impact of athletics on education." Times Reporter Charles Grutzner, working with twelve bird-dogging assistants, spent 3 1/2 weeks covering 40 college campuses. By last week he had flushed a covey of shockers.

Wherever the newsmen went, they found a depressingly recurrent pattern of "free rides" for good basketball and football players who were given "large cash payments, clothing and automobiles as inducements to enroll." The colleges, Grutzner found, do not wait around for athletes to come knocking at the door. High-pressure recruiting is part & parcel of the system of big-money college athletics.

Grutzner uncovered the story of one "prairie university" which "took a planeload of New England high-school athletes halfway across the country to inspect the plant and 'meet the boys.' " Another college has 140 special athletic scholarships, which pay $55-a-month living expenses to athletes, $75 to married men.

There were some exceptions. Athletes get no special consideration in the Midwest's Big Ten. At Northwestern, for example, 4.6% of the student body are athletes, who get only 3.6% of the scholarships. Grutzner also found that the colleges were not always to blame for the recruiting, subsidizing and win-at-all-costs spirit. Often it was "a tug of war, with educators pitted against Old Grads and local businessmen [and] the educators lost ground to those who put a Bowl bid above a Phi Beta Kappa."

But the Times found plenty of facts & figures to support the theory that a good athlete is likely to have the edge when it comes to smoothing the way with scholarships, cash benefits and snap courses. Items:

P: At Ohio State University, "the athletic office has lined up for players 150 jobs that pay up to $100 a month for 15 hours or less of work a week."

P: Southern Methodist University annually awards 154 straight athletic scholarships, 141 academic scholarships.

P: A spot check at Bradley University (Peoria, Ill.) showed that more than half of its star athletes major in physical education, getting credits for such subjects as "handball, elementary swimming, square and social dancing, touch football and first aid."

P: The University of Pennsylvania, loser of only three of its last 44 Ivy League football games, "is being shunned like the poison itch by other Ivy League colleges . . . Cornell is the only Ivy institution that has not omitted the Red and Blue powerhouse from its 1953 card." One reason for Penn's success: state legislators, with an eye for a good football team, make 675 scholarship nominations a year.

Concluded the Times: "The most serious effects of semi-professionalism and big money in intercollegiate sports are the establishment of false values, impairment of democracy in education, and a lowering in some cases of academic standards and cheapening of the college degree."

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