Revolt in a Football Palace

By Ezra Bowen.

Describing the Southwest Conference, the Dallas Morning News headlined LEAGUE OF ILL REPUTE. It was no small scold in a year when athletic chicanery in other college athletic associations has prompted court cases involving charges of fraud, illegal firing and point shaving. But the Southwest Conference, where four of nine universities are on probation or are being investigated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, has a special claim to dubious distinction: Southern Methodist University in Dallas, whose six N.C.A.A. probations in the past 28 years make it the reputed all-time leader among penalized schools. In mid-November, while under a three-year probation imposed in 1985, S.M.U. was rocked by further allegations: football talent hunters had reportedly given $25,000 to one player and a rent-free apartment to another.

If proved, such violations could cost S.M.U. the first-ever "death < penalty" of two years' banishment from intercollegiate football -- and $3.2 million in annual revenues the school normally earns from the sport. But winking at regulations is so endemic to big-time football that when the news broke, Dallas Developer (and alleged donor of the free apartment) George Owen, already permanently banned from recruiting by S.M.U. for previous violations, offered a classic rationale: "I don't know why they're making such a big deal of this," he said. "Everyone bends the rules a little."

Such attitudes are not altogether unknown in the 3,000-member Mustang Club, an S.M.U.-based organization whose dollars have helped underpin S.M.U.'s record as a jock palace (three Bowl games and a No. 2 national ranking in the past six years). Says one faculty member: "Only being No. 1 counts for anything . . . getting there is all that counts as long as you don't land in jail." Advocates of this hard-line boosterism hoped that S.M.U. could skate past the death penalty and be back to business as usual in '88 after the probation ends.

But in a stunning move, the long-complaisant S.M.U. faculty, through its senate, called for an end to athletic subsidies. "Football has become out of balance with the university's prime mission," said Economics Professor J. Carter Murphy. "The college is running a big entertainment industry." Two days later S.M.U. President L. Donald Shields took early retirement, citing a diabetes condition.

Nor was that all. Within a week Board Chairman -- and Texas Governor-elect -- Bill Clements announced the abolition of special admissions that let in some 15 athletes a year with SAT scores as low as 700 (400 points below the norm). And Clements declared he was "dead serious" about dropping the football program outright if it could not be brought under control.

Nine days later Athletic Director Bob Hitch and Football Coach Bobby Collins quit. Their resignations seemed normal in such circumstances, but there was irony in Shields' departure. Since his arrival in 1980, he had pushed academic improvement as well as big-time football, adding 21 endowed chairs. This year SAT scores of incoming students rose to 1,100 from last year's respectable 1,020. But Shields' rejuvenated professoriat, says Faculty Senate President Leroy Howe, "is less tolerant of academic abridgments. They see it as a fundamental compromise of the institution."

A fair number of S.M.U.'s 9,019 students seem fed up and worried too. Said Freshman Page Howard, addressing an unprecedented university-wide meeting called last week to debate the athletics issue: "I didn't come here because I wanted the football team to win. I wanted to learn. Now I'm scared when I graduate that people are going to laugh at my degree."

At other colleges beset by recent sports scandals, the reform zeal burns with varying intensity:

-- Tulane President Eamon Kelly, who abolished the basketball team in response to point-shaving allegations, declared he would not revive basketball until he "saw a change in the national environment surrounding intercollegiate athletics."

-- Memphis State, whose basketball coach Dana Kirk is under indictment for allegedly demanding payoffs to play certain teams, has insisted that the athletic director approve all scheduled games.

-- Maryland, where the athletic director and basketball coach resigned after the narcotics-induced death last June of Basketball Star Leonard Bias (who had earned a hefty share of F's in class), will insist that athletes meet all university academic requirements. So said Chancellor John Slaughter last week.

-- Georgia, whose president resigned after a court overruled the dismissal of Assistant Professor Jan Kemp when she objected to classroom cosseting of football players, is weighing 21 reforms. The all-white athletic board has been leavened by two black members at the insistence of interim President Henry King Stanford, who had said of the change, "Sometimes we must rise above principle to do what is right." And last week the governing university council recommended that the athletic association be brought tightly under the school's academic roof.

That same spirit now permeates the sports palace of S.M.U., where Biology Professor William Stallcup Jr., S.M.U.'s interim president, declares, "This has united the faculty like never before." Of any good-ole-boy tendency toward backsliding, Philosophy Professor Serge Kappler says, "I can't imagine business as usual again. Faculty and students wouldn't stand for it."

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Dallas