Although many Dartmouth community members and alumni severely criticized Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg last year for his private comments that Dartmouth's football recruitment hindered the academic quality and diversity of incoming classes, almost four in five Americans echo that sentiment in prioritizing academics over athletics.
In a poll conducted for the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics by Widmeyer Research and Polling of Washington, D.C., 79 percent of Americans believe that college athletes should focus more on their academics.
The poll, completed this past December, questioned 502 American citizens on appropriate behavior for collegiate athletes in the coming years. The findings suggest that the majority of Americans think that even more reforms are necessary to improve the state of college athletics.
Those polled felt particularly strong about the recruiting aspect of NCAA sports. Seventy-four percent of Americans believe that accepting athletes based on their athletic skill rather than their academic qualifications hurts the students in the long run. Four in five Americans polled agree with the statement: "Giving athletes who struggle academically unfair advantages causes them more harm than good."
While Furstenberg agrees with the sentiments expressed by the polls, he does not believe that Dartmouth is affected by many of the problems plaguing other Division 1 schools.
"While it's good that these studies come out, Dartmouth and Dartmouth athletics are very different from the rest of the country," Furstenberg said. "We don't offer athletic scholarships. Our students are students first, and they have to have other interests outside of their own teams. When they apply to Dartmouth, they know that."
Furstenberg emphasized that most of these studies focus on the schools that abuse the system, rather than those whose programs run smoothly.
"Many D-1 schools have significant financial and alumni ramifications tied into their sports teams, and so poor behavior and low graduation rates may be overlooked," he said. "Dartmouth's large endowment prevents issues like these from arising."
Four out of five Americans support a policy barring teams that fail to graduate at least half of their players from post-season play, and three out of four Americans want to reward the schools with the highest player graduation rates.
"The message to the NCAA from this poll is: 'Stay the course but remain diligent,'" Clifton R. Wharton Jr., vice chairman of the Knight Commission and former president of Michigan State University, said.
Furthermore, 91 percent of those polled are favorable to policies penalizing teams that fail to meet set academic standards, and eight in ten Americans think a collegiate athlete's experience should focus on academics, not athletics. More than half of those polled believe that schools care more about their athletes' eligibility to play than whether their athletes are actually learning.
The results of the polls prompted the commission to sponsor a summit on the Collegiate Athlete Experience at George Washington University on January 30. Current and former athletes spoke and answered questions about recruiting, drugs and trying to balance the pressures of academic life with those of collegiate-level athletics.
Although bringing these issues to national attention is important, their relevance to the Dartmouth campus is luckily not very high, Furstenberg said.
"In a lot of respects, these polls have it right," he said. "I think Dartmouth is a model in Division 1 athletics."
