American Values That Make Grade

By Tom Plate

Sometimes virtue doesn't have to be its own reward. The Cornell men's basketball team just won a pair of big-time basketball games here in the States. If you're not utterly shocked, then you don't know the inside story of college athletics in America.

Cornell University is an Ivy League school whose sole major misfortune is to be frozen every winter like an Arctic ruin in the God-awful upper New York state city of Ithaca. So when its men's team scored upset triumphs in basketball, it was national news. That's because it wasn't just any other time. They were victories in early rounds of the gala national-college-athletic-association (NCCA) marathon tournament known to all hysterical hoopster-lovers as ``March Madness" ― and/or ``The Big Dance." It was the venerable school's first NCAA tourney wins ever.

You would never know it when you travel abroad, but it gets very crazy in America around this time of year. For March Madness also sounds the opening gong for a different kind of youthful athletic frenzy. It's known as Spring Break. But let's not get into that.

The significance of the Cornell team's triumph over the much-higher ranked Temple University, from Philadelphia, is hard for outsiders to fathom. What's a good comparison? Maybe the armed forces of Taiwan invade and seek to occupy China? Or maybe I pitch the ninth inning of a Los Angeles Angels game and strike out Japan superstar Hideki Matsui in three or four pitches. Something like that.

The reason for the astonishment that swept over America is that Ivy League universities pledge not to award scholarships to students for athletics, only for academic achievement or palpable financial need. By contrast, at Temple (like the vast majority of U.S. schools) maybe everyone on the team has an athletic scholarship, including water boys. Not surprisingly, therefore, many Ivy League basketball players are short, light-weight and slow. But they also tend to have stratospheric IQs and brilliant grade-point averages.

Rare though it is, alas, the refusal to award athletic scholarships at an institution of higher learning is one of America's great educational-ethical stands. For the high-minded rule sets the high-bar standard of academic excellence in America. At my undergraduate school, Amherst College, the basketball team back then was something out of a Disney movie: four dwarfs and one actual normal-sized player. (That was 6-foot-6-inch Ken Howard, now, as a matter of fact, the esteemed president of the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood.) At my graduate school, surely the greatest college hoopster in Princeton's history was Bill Bradley, who became a Rhodes Scholar and a famous politician. He was shorter than Ken Howard.

When a major basketball power wins a NCAA game or even title ― whether universities from Maryland, Connecticut, Kentucky, Florida or wherever ― you are observing a semi-professional athletic team represented by a university athletic department that probably has more power on campus than the otherwise powerful academic Senate. These days, the best college players don't even bother to hang around campus for four years to get their degree. Some sign multimillion dollar pro-contracts after just one year at school.

That makes me sick. For it makes institutions of higher education little more than transition daycare centers for the National Basketball Association. The entire scene shows the power of the almighty U.S. dollar at its worst. To be sure, the quality of the basketball is often superb. It's even possible to make the argument that somehow these successful athletic programs benefit the academic programs, too. But I, for one, don't buy it. Instead, they tend to corrupt the academic environment. And every honest student knows it.

There's a proposal in the air of America to expand March Madness and make the tournament bigger. But anything that bloats, even more, college athletics is a bad idea. What we need to expand and improve is our academic excellence. This is what has helped turn the U.S. into a superpower. This is what has helped make us the envy of the world. Basketball is just a game, though a great one. What's of enduring value from our universities is the triumph of our educated brains.

Cornell has its own troubles, to be sure. A spate of recent student suicides drew attention to its extreme isolation and internal competitiveness. No one is perfect. But otherwise, off-court, there's no one in the NCAA field that sets the same standard. Cornell might never win a national hoops championship, but already it's the biggest winner in the NCAA's 64-team field.

Internationally syndicated columnist Tom Plate, now writing a book on Malaysia's Mohamad Mahathir, taught for a span of 15 years at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which last won the NCAA championship in 1995, and holds the record for most NCAA wins (11). He can be reached at platecolumn@gmail.com.