The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, often referred to simply as the Knight Commission, is a panel of members of the American academic, athletic and journalism communities, with an eye toward reform of college athletics, particularly in regard to practices in recruiting for football and basketball teams.
The commission was founded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which was itself founded by brothers John S. Knight and James L. Knight, members of the founding family of what became the Knight Ridder newspaper and broadcasting chain. The commission first met in 1989 after a series of scandals in college sports. The founding co-chairmen of the commission were Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, and William C. Friday, former president of the University of North Carolina.
Currently, the commission serves as a de facto watchdog group which seeks to reform issues in college sports, mainly relating to excesses in recruiting, gender equity, and academic problems of student athletes. As an independent commission, it has no official connection to governing bodies such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the primary sanctioning body for college sports in the United States, or any government agencies. But because of its blue ribbon panel and high profile within the news media, the commission's work carries considerable influence within college sports as a whole.
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The commission issued its groundbreaking report, Keeping Faith with the Student Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics,[1] in 1991. In the report, the Knight Commission proposed a major overhaul in the way colleges run their athletic departments, proposing what it called the “one-plus-three” model — in which the “one,” control by the college president, is directed toward the “three” goals of academic integrity, financial integrity and independent certification. The report was influential in the implementation of many reforms by the NCAA, including a major restructuring within the NCAA itself, when in 1996 the governance of the association was taken away from college athletic directors and put into the hands of college presidents.
In 2001, the commission issued its second major report, largely detailing what had transpired in the ten years since Keeping Faith was issued. A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education [2] reiterated almost all of the original report's recommendations, while taking note that roughly two-thirds of the reforms recommended in Keeping Faith had been implemented to one degree or another. A quote from the section titled "Ten Years Later," subtitled "The Arms Race":
A frantic, money-oriented modus operandi that defies responsibility dominates the structure of big-time football and basketball. The vast majority of these schools don't profit from their athletics programs: At over half the schools competing at the NCAA's Division I-A level in 1999, expenses exceeded revenues by an average of $3.3 million, an increase of 18 percent over the previous two years. On the other hand, for the 48 Division I-A institutions where revenues exceeded expenses, the average "profit" more than doubled, increasing 124 percent from $1.7 million to $3.8 million from 1997 to 1999.... Too much in major college sports is geared to accommodating excess. Too many athletic directors and conference commissioners serve principally as money managers, ever alert to maximizing revenues. And too many have looked to their stadiums and arenas to generate more money.[3]
One notable recommendation in A Call to Action was that the NCAA restrict participation in postseason playoffs to teams whose graduation rate is 50 percent or greater.
The Knight Commission held its last public meeting [1] on October 26, 2009 in Miami. The meeting focused on the financial aspects of intercollegiate athletics, particularly the unsustainability of the economic model and the increasing levels of compensation of college football and basketball coaches.
A survey released at the meeting, titled, "Presidential Survey on the Cost and Financing of Intercollegiate Athletics"[4]revealed the subsidies provided by most FBS institutions to their athletics budgets are rising more quickly than educational budgets. This, together with other opinions revealed in the survey, underscored the Commission's urgency to address the escalating costs of college sports through collective action, which requires support from presidents, NCAA leadership, university boards of trustees and conferences across the country. The Commission stated its intent to make its own recommendations in a report scheduled to be released next spring. At its meeting, the Commission considered the survey findings, additional research published in its online report, College Sports 101 [5], and the testimonies made by higher education and college sports experts during public meetings held by the Commission over the past year.
As of 2008, the commission's co-chairs are William English Kirwan, chancellor, University System of Maryland and R. Gerald Turner, president of Southern Methodist University and founding chairman of the NCAA Certification Committee, which itself came about largely through the work of the Knight Commission.
Other better-known members: