University of Hartford President Walter Harrison would make Teddy Roosevelt proud. With a calm demeanor and soft voice, he wields a tremendous amount of power in the billion dollar business that college athletics has become.
Harrison’s work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most importantly his duties as the chairman of the NCAA’s Committee on Academic Performance, led the Chronicle of Higher Education to name him one of the nation’s 10 most powerful people in college sports.
With the NCAA set to levy serious sanctions on athletic programs that fail to keep its student-athletes eligible and on track to graduate, Harrison is keenly aware that he may become a villain to coaches and athletic directors.
And he doesn’t mind.
“If they want to make me into a cartoon figure, that’s fine,” he said. “Somebody has to be the sheriff and I’m okay if that’s me. I believe our cause is a very important one and I feel it’s very important to stand up for these student-athletes. But I do find it hard to recognize myself as a tough guy.”
It has been more than five years since Harrison joined the NCAA board of directors as the representative from the America East Conference, of which Hartford is a member. Within a year, Harrison was asked to chair the Committee on Academic Performance and he accepted after slight hesitation.
“I had voted to establish the committee, so when I was asked to chair it, I thought it wouldn’t be right to vote for it but not take the position,” he said. “But I knew it was going to be a lot of work.”
Passing Grades
By 2005, Harrison was also the chairman of the NCAA Executive Committee, the organization’s highest board, where he was instrumental in a massive overhaul of how the NCAA tracks academic performance.
For years, the NCAA used graduation rates as an indicator of how well athletes performed academically, which gave universities a basic percentage of how many athletes graduated within a six-year window.
“For example, students that came into the program in 2001 would still count today,” Harrison said. “That’s not an accurate picture of what’s going on.”
In its place, the NCAA has developed the Academic Progress Rate (APR) that tracks how students are doing each semester of each year. Beginning this year, universities will receive sanctions, most notably limiting the number of scholarships that colleges may award for sports where its athletes are not performing to NCAA-mandated standards.
The APR is a metric used by the NCAA that rewards schools for students who remain in school and remain academically eligible to play or graduate. The formula is measured up to 1000, with 925 being the cut-off for penalties to be imposed. The most recent APR report, released in April, found that most of the state’s universities who participate in Division I sports were above those standards. For example, the University of Connecticut had an APR of 934 for basketball, 963 for football and 970 for women’s basketball. The University of Hartford has an APR of 982 for baseball, 940 for men’s basketball and 976 for women’s basketball. Predictably, Yale University had the best APR scores with a perfect 1000 score in 13 sports including baseball.
Only Central Connecticut State University was below the threshold in any sport, with an APR score of 884 for football and 866 for baseball. During the fall semester, it meant a reduction of three scholarships for the football team.
CCSU athletic director C.J. Jones said the school’s problems were due to student-athletes leaving the university, not because the students had failed to keep up in the classroom.
“We’ve always had a decent graduation rate,” he said. “It only counts scholarship sports and those kids not on scholarship don’t count. We are focused on meeting and exceeding the standards but it takes some time to navigate.”
One measure CCSU has taken is to require study hours for all freshmen athletes.
It is exactly the kind of step that the NCAA had in mind when it started using the APR.
“It took us two years to formulate all these rules and decide how to hold people accountable,” Harrison explained. “We’ve started to publish the results and publicizing when schools aren’t meeting these standards.”
Harrison asserted that “a lot of big-name programs” could be hit hard as universities begin to be penalized.
Scholarships In Jeopardy
“I know there are going to be coaches and athletic directors that are not going to be happy and they’re going to complain to their school presidents,” Harrison said. “There could be as many as 40 percent of [men’s] college basketball teams that could lose scholarships.”
The early return from the NCAA’s renewed vigor towards academics is that the gross majority of sports have athletes that are performing well academically. However, athletes in the two revenue-generating sports — football and men’s basketball — along with baseball, are falling behind.
“It’s a problem because the public perception is that these kids aren’t going to class and we have to confront that,” Harrison said. “I think we’re succeeding to a point, but we’re also failing a lot of students.”
There is a difference, according to Harrison, between a regular student and a student-athlete at the top level of college athletics because of scholarships.
“There is an implied consent on the part of the university that, when it gives out scholarships, to take care of these students,” Harrison said. “It’s no coincidence that two of three sports with problems are the revenue producers, though baseball is surprising.”
Though there has been added emphasis from the NCAA, UConn associate athletic director for communications Michael Enright said the university has always been committed to its student athletes.
“We’ve long had a program in place for our student athletes to deal with things they encounter, like missed classes due to games, that the average student does not deal with,” said Enright. “We have a pretty proven track record of academic support for athletes.”
UConn has long tracked their students’ graduation rates and the athletic department is pleased with the latest NCAA formula.
“We applaud the NCAA for its APR because there are a million different ways you can track these things,” said Enright. “We think the NCAA has come up with a very good formula for doing so.”