Intercollegiate athletic programs continue to grow to financially, physically, and ethically challenged levels, despite institutions' stated priorities to the contrary. Organizational theories offer lenses for understanding why colleges and universities appear to make athletics decisions that do not seem to be in their interests. Exploring the forces—structural, legal, social and cultural, and market—external to the institution leads to an understanding of the environment’s role in constraining campus leaders’ choices. The challenge is how to reap educational, social, and economic benefits from sports programs without harming the institution's academic and moral integrity. This volume explores how relatively independent forces constrain the ability of institutional, athletics, and faculty leaders to limit perceived excesses in the growth of intercollegiate athletics programs on their campuses and nationally. Academic and athletic cultures; historical precedent; external organizations and constituencies; external laws and regulations; and markets for athletics-related materials, entertainment, student-atheletes, and professionals: all bring outside forces to bear on the college culture, leadership, and decision making. This monograph explores how the unintended interactions of these forces constrain campus leadership of intercollegiate athletics and consider the resulting policy and leadership implications. It examines the unique historical role of football—and its associated commercialization and culture of masculinity—as shaping the foundational structure and regulation of college sports. The monograph concludes with campus leadership strategies and recommendations. This is Volume 30, Issue 6 of the of the ASHE Higher Education Report series.

Intercollegiate athletics continue to bedevil American higher education. This book explores the complexities of intercollegiate athletics while explaining the organizational structures, key players, terms, and important issues relevant to the growing fields of recreational studies, sports management, and athletic administration.

Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. examines the corrupting influence and damaging financial effects of big-time intercollegiate athletics, especially football and to a lesser extent basketball, on American higher education. Including historical and contemporary perspectives, the book traces the growth of intercollegiate sports from largely student-run activities supervised by faculty to the gargantuan, taxpayer-supported spectacles that now dominate many public universities. It investigates the regressive student fees that have helped subsidize big-time sports at public universities and prop up chronically unprofitable athletic departments, as well as the corrosive effects of athletics on the university’s academic enterprise. A review of the alleged salutary effects of massive sports programs, such as spurring alumni donations and student applications, reveals that such benefits are largely illusory, more myth than real. The book also pays special attention to the often prescient, if largely unsuccessful, opponents of these developments, and considers the alternatives to big-time athletics, from abolition to professionalization to club sports. Students, scholars, sports fans, and those interested in learning how big-time football and basketball have cast such an enormous—and often baleful—shadow upon American colleges and universities will profit from this provocative and engagingly written book.

A go-to resource to help provosts, deans, presidents, and trustees effectively meet the challenges of leading a college or university. As the chief academic officer, the provost plays the central role in the contemporary university or college. He or she leads the faculty and serves as their key representative to the administration while simultaneously acting as the administration's spokesperson to the academic faculty. How has this essential leadership position evolved over the past few decades, and what are the best practices to adopt for succeeding in specific operational areas? In seventeen essays written by some of the most successful chief academic officers in the United States, The Provost's Handbook outlines key topics related to the changing environment of higher education while explaining what constitutes effective leadership at the college and university level. How, for example, does the provost lead in a time of disruption and shifting needs? What skills should he or she nurture in new faculty? What role should data and institutional research play in decision making? How can a provost navigate the often stormy situations of shared governance? These questions—and many more challenges presented by this role—are addressed in this essential volume. Assembled by James Martin and James E. Samels, accomplished authors and scholars of leadership in higher education, The Provost's Handbook is destined to become the go-to resource for deans, presidents, trustees, and chief academic officers everywhere.

This book examines, within the context and concerns of education, Foucault’s reflections on friendship in his 1981 interview “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In the interview, Foucault advances the notion of a homosexual ascesis based on experimental friendships, proposing that homosexuality can provide the conditions for inventing new relational forms that can engender a homosexual culture and ethics, “a way of life,” not resembling institutionalized codes for relating. The contributors to this volume draw from Foucault’s reflections on ascesis and friendship in order to consider a range of topics and issues related to critical studies of sexualities and genders in education. Collectively, the chapters open a dialogue for researchers, scholars, and educators interested in exploring the importance and relevance of Foucault’s reflections on friendship for studies of schooling and education.

Written for Higher Education Masters and PhD programs, this landmark textbook joins the theory of feminist post-structuralism with research methods for the purpose of policy analysis in Higher Education. It showcases the different methods that can be applied to a range of topics in Higher Education policy and policy development. Reconstructing Policy in Higher Education highlights the work of accomplished and award-winning scholars, and provides an in-depth examination of theoretical frameworks and concrete examples of how feminist post-structuralism effectively informs research methods and can serve as a vital tool for policy-makers and analysts.

The commercial model of college sports entangles presidents, boards, and their institutions in a complex web of dysfunctional commitments. The unrivaled amount of cash poured into the college athletic system has made sports programs breeding grounds for corruption while diverting crucial resources from the academic mission of universities. Like money in Washington politics, the influence bought by a complex set of self-interested actors seriously undermines movement toward reform while trapping universities in a cycle of escalating competition. Longtime sport sociologist Howard L. Nixon II approaches the issue from the perspective of college presidents—how they are seduced by prestige or pressured by economics into building programs that move schools toward a commercial model of athletics. Nixon situates his analysis in the context of what he calls “the intercollegiate golden triangle,” a powerful social network of athletic, media, and private corporate commercial interests. This network lures presidents and other university leaders into an athletic arms race with promises of institutional enhancements, increased enrollments, better student morale, improved alumni loyalty, more financial contributions, and higher prestige. These promises can cloud the judgment of college presidents and governing boards, entangling them in an athletic trap that restricts their influence. Unable to control spending, inequalities, and deviance within commercialized athletic programs, universities are ensnared in financial, political, and social obligations that are difficult to sustain—or escape. Nixon clarifies the structure of this trap, describes how higher education institutions fall into it, and explores what it means for institutions and presidents caught in it. This timely analysis also has relevance to the debates about the role of the NCAA and ongoing reform efforts in college sports. The Athletic Trap will be of interest to university presidents, board members, and administrators, sport sociologists concerned with the balance of power between academics and athletics, and anyone else with a serious interest in college sports and its future.

College Sports and Institutional Values in Competition interrogates the relationship between athletics and higher education, exploring how college athletics departments reflect many characteristics of their institutions and are also susceptible to the same challenges in delivering on their mission. Chapters cover the historical contexts and background of campus athletics, issues and institutional tensions over market pressures, the spectacle of college athletics and how this spectacle influences athlete experiences, and the ways in which leaders are navigating these issues. Through stories of higher education that focus on the ways athletic departments leverage their institutional values, this book encourages readers to examine the purpose, mission, and academic values of their institutions, and to evaluate the role of their athletic programs, to improve outcomes and experiences on campus for students and student-athletes alike.

“Brings to the new field of university ethics the case of the Catholic Colleges and Universities. . . . [A] compelling plea to make mission drive the model.” —James F. Keenan, S.J., author of University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics Gerald J. Beyer’s Just Universities discusses ways that U.S. Catholic institutions of higher education have embodied or failed to embody Catholic social teaching in their campus policies and practices. Beyer argues that the corporatization of the university has infected U.S. higher education with hyper-individualistic models and practices that hinder the ability of Catholic institutions to create an environment imbued with bedrock values and principles of Catholic Social Teaching such as respect for human rights, solidarity, and justice. Beyer problematizes corporatized higher education and shows how it has adversely affected efforts at Catholic schools to promote worker justice on campus; equitable admissions; financial aid; retention policies; diversity and inclusion policies that treat people of color, women, and LGBTQ persons as full community members; just investment; and stewardship of resources and the environment. “[C]ompelling...inspirational in its call to action.---Adrianna Kezar, Wilbur Kieffer Endowed Professor and Dean's Professor of Leadership, University of Southern California, Director of the Pullias Center (pullias.usc.edu), and Director of the Delphi Project “A remarkable analysis. . . . Higher education should be most grateful for Beyer’s contribution.” —James A. Donahue, President of St. Mary’s College of California [A] pioneering, much-needed book. . . . essential reading for anyone interested in university ethics and religious higher education.” ―Anglican Theological Review “Sure to become a seminal text for future research and discussions on this topic. . . . Highly Recommended.” —Choice

Creating the conditions that foster student success in college has never been more important. As many as four-fifths of high school graduates need some form of postsecondary education to be economically self-sufficient and manage the increasingly complex social, political, and cultural issues of the 21st century. But about 40 percent of those who start college fail to earn a degree within 6 or 8 years, an unacceptably low number. This report examines the complicated array of social, economic, cultural and educational factors related to student success in college, defined as academic achievement, engagement in educationally purposeful activities, satisfaction, acquisition of desired knowledge, skills and competencies, persistence, and attainment of educational objectives. Although the trajectory for academic success in college is established long before students matriculate, most institutions can do more than they are at present to shape how students prepared for college and they they engage in productive activities after they arrive. This is the 5th issue of the 32nd volume of the Jossey-Bass series ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monograph is the definitive analysis of a tough higher education problem, based on thorough research of pertinent literature and institutional experiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providing critical reviews of each manuscript before publication.