He Shoots, He Scores, He Studies.

In the rarefied world of academia, the spotlight seldom strays from learned argument to scholarly deceit. Scams, after all, are more the province of Enron and Worldcom than Harvard and Yale. But sometimes a sham does occur even in the august precincts of the academy--especially when money creeps into the shadows. Money may not be the source of all evil, but it has a nasty habit of hanging around the con.

And there is big money in college sports. Basketball and football, which has just kicked off its 2004 season, account for billions of dollars in revenue for the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. The NCAA is in the middle of an 11-year, $62-billion television deal for its basketball championship tournament. The bounty from 28 football bowl games kicks in an additional $184 million-and-change annually. And then there’s the NCAA’s new 11-year sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola--covering 87 championships in 22 sports--worth a half a billion dollars.

Not bad for amateur athletes.

The problem is that those enormous sums--and the pressures they create--are reshaping the landscape of college sports and having an insidious effect on the academic mission of universities across the country. And the last couple of years have produced some memorable shams.

At St. Bonaventure in 2003, the basketball coach, athletic director and university president lost their jobs because a player was admitted to the school without the required academic credentials; this year, at the University of Georgia, assistant basketball coach Jim Harrick Jr. was fired because of alleged academic fraud; and at Fresno State, a former team statistician revealed that he was paid to write term papers for three basketball players under previous coach Jerry Tarkanian.

But the last year was notable for more than just scandal and excess. Indeed, this was the year the NCAA and its member schools finally agreed to make the words “student-athlete” mean something--a huge achievement in an era in which high-revenue, high-stakes college sports have turned their amateur participants into year-round, full-time athletes.

The NCAA reforms, approved in April, will impose an escalating series of penalties--with real financial costs--on universities that do not meet certain academic standards, including minimum graduation rates. According to NCAA president Myles Brand, the measures are the strongest ever passed by the NCAA, holding not only athletes, but also teams and institutions, accountable for academic achievement.

Are they workable? Is it possible that athletes who were poor students in high school can learn to be good students in college? Can coaches and college administrators hold star athletes accountable academically and create a system that spots problems before they lead to academic fraud?

The answers may lie in the pioneering efforts of one famous university, whose reputation is built more on astrophysics than Astro-Turf.

In the world of college football, USC, Oklahoma, Florida State and other perennial powers are household names. UC Berkeley is not. Its football team is best known for a Keystone Cops-like kickoff return that eked out a victory against Stanford in 1982. Its basketball team, meanwhile, is noteworthy for attracting gifted players such as Jason Kidd and Shareef Abdur-Rahim, only to see them abandon school early for NBA riches.

But in the last two years, Berkeley ranked in the top 10 among the more than 300 Division I schools in the Sports Academy Directors’ Cup standings, which gauge a university’s overall athletic success. (Division I schools must meet certain criteria relating to number of sports, attendance and financial aid offered.)

There has never been any doubt about Cal’s academic prowess. According to the National Research Council’s 1995 study (conducted only every 10 years), no other university has as many graduate programs ranked in the top 10 in their fields. The school’s academic departments consistently rank among the top five in the country.

And when it comes to performance in both academics and sports, few schools are in the same league. Berkeley’s graduation rate for its student-athletes has been as much as 11 points higher than the average for all Division I schools. Last year almost half of Cal student-athletes had cumulative grade point averages above 3.0--no small achievement given the school’s rigorous academic demands.

And then there are the athletic demands: Division I athletes, who compete at the highest levels, sometimes put in akin to a 40-hour-plus workweek. Although NCAA rules limit formal training to 20 hours a week, loopholes allow other activities to take place.

According to University of Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer, a former member of the NCAA executive committee, when it comes to balancing athletics and academics, “Cal is the best public school in the country.”

However, Berkeley was, until recently, a noted underachiever in this regard. Worse still, it was known for cheating.

In the mid ‘90s, Cal’s basketball program was busted in a “pay-for-play” scandal, in which basketball coach Todd Bozeman paid about $30,000 to a recruit’s parents. Berkeley dismissed the coach and was forced to forfeit its victories from the 1994-’95 and 1995-’96 seasons. It also returned 90% of its share of revenue from the 1996 NCAA tournament.

Then the other sneaker dropped. In 1999, a case of academic fraud hit the football program. Ethnic studies professor Alex Saragoza gave two student-athletes credit for a course they had not taken. After a formal inquiry, the NCAA was unsparing in its criticism. It concluded that UC Berkeley failed to maintain adequate institutional control over its football program “when it certified the two student-athletes’ eligibility and allowed them to compete throughout the 1999 football season; when it conducted a patently inadequate investigation following the conference inquiry into the eligibility of the two student-athletes; and when it falsely reported to the conference that no impropriety had occurred.”

If it sounded more like an indictment of a white-collar criminal than a university, it was because this was a serious charge of malfeasance against an esteemed academic institution. To make matters worse, the NCAA considered UC Berkeley a “repeat violator,” because the university was already on probation for the basketball scandal, and it was the third time since 1988 that the university had appeared before the NCAA committee on infractions.

The NCAA imposed sanctions, including making Cal ineligible for any bowl game in 2002. Unlike many cases of academic fraud, this scandal did not stem from overzealous coaches leaning on reluctant faculty members to go easy on valued athletes. Rather, it resulted from an individual professor’s apparently isolated transgression, followed by “a woefully inadequate inquiry,” the NCAA said. This was “not a case in which the football program failed the university,” the organization concluded, “in this case the university failed itself.”

The 1,200-acre Berkeley campus certainly looks like an academic mecca. The lush, tree-lined grounds, with sweeping lawns and a wide range of flora--from California redwoods to a towering eucalyptus grove--have all the Ivy League touches, except the ivy. The research and teaching at Cal is a combination perhaps without peer among public universities in the United States. Its student body is drawn from an unusually talented applicant pool: Nearly 200 National Merit Scholarship finalists are in each entering class. Those academic realities give Cal’s athletic program certain advantages, at least in theory. As Oregon’s Frohnmayer explains, Cal can attract the “the pick of the litter” of student athletes, selecting only those who have impressive intellectual as well as athletic gifts. If Cal athletes do indeed work as hard at scholarship as they do at sports, they will, in theory, perform well in the classroom, easing pressure to cut them a break on academics.

By and large, that was true at the Cal campus. But then came the great college athletics arms race, which began in the 1980s and is still accelerating. Rice University, a private school in Houston with a stalwart academic reputation, recently studied its athletic programs and issued a report stating that “the large and growing financial incentives among NCAA teams ... combined with multimillion-dollar coaching salaries, make Division I athletics look increasingly like a business instead of an extracurricular activity.” America’s cultural “need to win” is a powerful intoxicant that afflicts even the nation’s most prestigious universities. And this competitive tension is even prevalent at schools without athletic scholarships--such as the Ivy League. “Those schools struggle with the same pressures to admit and fund certain athletes who may not otherwise ‘fit’ the admissions criteria. ‘Packaging,’ as it is often called in the Ivy League, results in de facto athletic scholarships for the star point guard or the desperately needed pitcher. The value of winning, even at these lower levels of NCAA competition, should not be underestimated.”

As a member of the highly competitive Pac 10 conference, Cal athletics felt those pressures, and responded. The athletic department’s $40-million budget for 27 sports is substantial, near the top end of the range in the conference. Stanford’s 2003 budget was $45 million for 34 sports; Washington State’s current budget is $23 million for 17 sports.

As athletic department spending ballooned over the last 15 years, some administrators and faculty members at Cal sounded the alarm. Even before the scandals of the 1990s, the university recognized that competitive pressures threatened the academic integrity of the institution, and began considering ways to restore the balance. The twin black eyes of the football and basketball programs hastened the reforms, creating a system that today is the envy of colleges around the nation. As Frohnmayer notes, Cal works hard to integrate athletes into the academic life of the school--something relatively few schools manage to accomplish--and it “fosters a special culture that values academics.”

For starters, the school cuts its top athletes no slack, but provides ample academic support for those who need it. Every student must meet stringent academic demands, regardless of the sport. What’s more, there are no special Math for Jocks or similar classes, as there are on many Division 1 campuses. Cal offers no physical education major, which is a valid and worthwhile discipline at some universities, but at others provides gifted athletes with an easy academic ride.

Cal also has moved to assert greater institutional control over athletics by making fundamental structural changes. Last year, for example, Berkeley’s faculty governing body, the academic senate, approved a policy regarding student-athlete admissions. It limits the number of applicants who can receive admissions preference because of their athletic skills. In devising the policy, the faculty wrestled with a dilemma facing all Division I schools: how to reconcile the need for an academically qualified student body with the desire for successful athletic teams. As the policy noted, because some recruits can be admitted with lower scholastic qualifications, they will be at “a correspondingly higher academic risk if admitted as Berkeley students.” To address this conundrum, the academic senate declared that “the demonstration of a commitment of the athlete to engage in the academic enterprise of the campus is key to the admissions decision.”

Cal coaches now are educated to recruit the “right” type of student-athletes: those with academic potential, a desire to learn and a willingness to use the special academic support resources and to embrace the unique university culture.

Derek Van Rheenen is director of Cal’s Athletic Study Center, which includes a spacious arboretum for quiet scholarship, separate classrooms for individual and group tutorials and a computer lab. A former professional soccer player with undergraduate and graduate degrees from Berkeley, Van Rheenen seems well-suited to break down the divide between academics and athletics. Lean and clean-cut, he could almost pass for the student-athlete he once was. Van Rheenen is a faculty member in Cal’s graduate school of education, where he and another professor developed a master’s program on the interplay between athletics and academics. There is no other program like it in the U.S., and two of his graduates now are academic advisors at James Madison University in Virginia and the University of Maryland.

To fulfill the university’s requirement to admit the right type of student-athletes, Van Rheenen meets with most recruits whose high school academic credentials are substandard. His purpose is to assess their motivation and weed out those who seem unable or unwilling to perform in the classroom.

Van Rheenen’s office includes an inviting leather couch for student visitors. “Anybody who’s any good at this job also wears a counseling hat,” he explains. The center provides more traditional services as well--from advising and tutoring to career planning and professional training.

To track each athlete admitted to the university, Van Rheenen developed a comprehensive database that documents their academic progress, performance and career interests. And as a result of the scandal, anyone in academic advising--not just the designated advisor--can see any athlete’s entire academic record. This promotes communication among all the key players involved in the athletes’ dual lives. To encourage even greater collaboration, another initiative is on the drawing board: a faculty-athletic fellows program in which faculty members would informally act as career mentors and advisors to each of Cal’s 27 teams.

One key to Cal’s success is the decision to separate the Athletic Study Center from the athletic department. Only about 25% of all universities do this with their academic support programs. The others are housed within the athletic departments, which leave them open to more potential abuse.

The list of reforms at Cal is long, and some of them might not work at universities that don’t enjoy Berkeley’s “pick of the litter” advantages. But then again, few other public universities are as demanding of students as Cal. If universities began screening out athletes who weren’t serious about their studies, many high school athletes would get the message. You want to play Division I basketball? You better hit the books.

Certainly every university in the land could become as disciplined as Cal is at counseling student athletes and tracking their classroom performance, and they could find ways to integrate athletics and academics while building firewalls between the overseers of the athletic department and those responsible for academics. It’s hard to fathom why any university wouldn’t at least try, especially after looking at the measurable results at Berkeley. According to a 2003 NCAA report, Cal’s student-athletes had a graduation rate of 73%, compared with 62% among Division I student-athletes nationwide. (Cal’s graduation rate for the entire student body was 84%.)

If Berkeley has made substantial progress in developing a better model for training true student-athletes, the athletes themselves have clearly played a role in this success.

One such example is Lorenzo Alexander. A 6-foot 3-inch, 295-pound defensive tackle, Alexander, a senior from Berkeley’s St. Mary’s High School, was recruited by some of the top football powers in the country, including USC, Miami, Oklahoma and Louisiana State University. But the 21-year-old legal studies major chose Cal, and he says it has made a difference. He cites the school’s “academic game plan” as instrumental to his success. Created by football coach Jeff Tedford upon his arrival in 2002, the plan calls on coaches to meet up to three times a week with players to assess their academic progress. “It’s like hospital triage,” says Joe Morello, advising coordinator at the Athletic Study Center, “where you tag athletes with the most critical needs and target them for the most intensive care.”

With a backbreaking football schedule, such triage can come in handy. But even a highly motivated student such as Alexander sometimes stumbles. Under unrelenting pressure, he failed a statistics class last year that followed his early-morning weight-lifting routine. “I was feeling burned out and got lazy,” he says, as if maintaining a full course load and arising every morning to lift weights from 7 to 8 is something everyone does. He sometimes skipped the 9 a.m. statistics class “to go home and nap,” until it all caught up with him at the end of the semester. But that’s where the academic game plan kicked in to turn things around. He took the same course again, with different results. “Coach made sure I got a tutor, [and he] was more persistent in checking my class attendance, my notes and my test results, and this time around I got a B-minus.” Almost as an afterthought, he adds, “The only time the system doesn’t work is when a player doesn’t really try.”

Tyler Fredrickson, a former Cal kicker and punter who this year signed as a free agent with the Seattle Seahawks, says football was a bigger challenge than the academics. During the season, it was like having a full-time job on top of his studies, demanding more than 32 hours a week, including game-day preparation and the game itself, which didn’t even include team meals, travel and physical rehabilitation. Off-season, practice, meetings and weight training took about 10 to 20 hours a week. So although he was called a student-athlete, in reality he was more athlete than student, though he did graduate in 2003 as a film studies major and received a master’s in education this year. “In terms of time, thought, focus and effort,” he says, “I was 70% football and 30% student.”

According to Chris Murphy, another recent graduate and former offensive lineman, being a student-athlete at Berkeley is like having not one but “two full-time jobs.” Murphy, who maintained an impressive 3.48 GPA, notes that “being a full-time student at Cal alone is incredibly tough.” He talks about lessons learned and about “performing in the face of pain”--not only on the football field, but in the classroom too. “To an extent,” he says, “your self-esteem is determined by your performance on the field--or in the classroom--and if one’s not going well, it affects the other.”

Although Cal is still rebuilding its football program, it has come a long way since the scandal-filled years. At the beginning of this season, the football team is ranked No. 13 in the Associated Press media poll. Last year, Cal handed eventual NCAA co-champion USC its only defeat--not too shabby for a team that had won only one game as recently as 2001 and, until last year, hadn’t had consecutive winning seasons in more than a decade.

On the academic side, the situation has improved as well. Morello, who seems genuinely dedicated to supporting the athletes, uses every tool at his disposal, including a little reverse psychology when necessary. This year he came up with a novel, if unorthodox, plan to deal with a player who had stubbornly neglected one out of four classes every semester. So Morello made a bet with a coach--while within earshot of the player--that he would never pass all his classes during the upcoming semester. Of course, the player, whom Morello knew was competitive by nature, took the bait and now makes a point of reminding him each time they meet that he’s on a fool’s errand, destined to lose the bet.

Class is in session.

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2 days in the life

Lorenzo Alexander, No. 76, is a senior defensive tackle at UC Berkeley majoring in legal studies. NCAA rules limit formal athletic training to 20 hours per week, but individual workouts and game preparation can easily make it closer to 40 hours. And that’s in addition to the 13 units of classes he is enrolled in this fall. Here is the schedule for two days in his busy week.

TUESDAY

8-9:30 a.m. Legal Studies 182

10-11 a.m. Legal Studies 151

11:00-noon Legal Studies 182 (Discussion)

12:15-12:45 p.m. Weekly media luncheon (Memorial Stadium)

2:20-3:30 p.m. Defensive line position meetings (Memorial Stadium)

4-6:15 p.m. Team practice (Memorial Stadium)

6:30-7:30 p.m. Training table dinner (Memorial Stadium)

7:30-8:15 p.m. Academic Game Plan (Study hall at Memorial Stadium)

8:15-9 p.m. Optional game video study)

WEDNESDAY

7-7:50 a.m. Weight lifting (Memorial Stadium)

10-11 a.m. Philosophy 115

1-1:30 p.m. Media interviews (when necessary)

2:20-3:30 p.m. Defensive line position meetings

4-6:15 p.m. Team practice (Memorial Stadium)

6:30-7:30 p.m. Training table dinner (Memorial Stadium)

7:30-8:15 p.m. Academic Game Plan (Study Hall at Memorial Stadium)

8:15-9 p.m. Optional game video study