Vol. 113: Why was this coach fired?

Ideals vs. reality in the Ivy League

When Clark Kerr was chancellor of the University of California back in the ’60s, some cynic once asked him what a chancellor does.

“It’s very simple,” Kerr replied. “My job is to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.”

Had Kerr been running an Ivy League school, I used to believe, his witty retort would have referred to sports for the students. Under the Ivy League code formalized in 1953, intercollegiate athletics were to be operated not to entertain alumni or raise funds, but to provide educational opportunities for all students, much like any other campus activity. Coaches were to be evaluated not on their won-lost records but for their teaching skills. Under Article III of the agreement, “undue strain upon coaches” was to be eliminated.

In my day— the early ’60s— any Penn student could draw a helmet and a set of pads and practice with the varsity football team, even if that meant merely holding a blocking shield or otherwise serving as cannon fodder for the “real” varsity players. Regardless of a student’s size, ability, or experience, no one was turned away, any more than Penn would have turned a paying student away from a classroom.

Athletes could still be recruited aggressively under the Ivy code, but the primary inducement would be the incomparable prestige of an Ivy League degree: Although the Ivy League (then and now) accounts for fewer than 1% of America’s undergraduates, its eight schools have produced more than 10% of the chief executives of America’s 500 largest corporations, at least 15% of the members of Congress, and more than 40% of all college-educated U.S. presidents.

Singing with the fans

These thoughts came to mind last week when I read that Penn had fired its varsity basketball coach, Steve Donahue.

Why, you wonder, would an Ivy League university dismiss a coach after his ninth season on the job, not to mention ten earlier seasons as a Penn assistant coach? A coach whose devotion to his players and his school was never questioned? A coach who had previously built a dynasty at Cornell? A coach who required his players to join their Penn schoolmates and fans in the traditional postgame singing of “The Red and the Blue,” instead of just scurrying off the court as previous Penn players had done?

Consider the possible explanations:

— The coach and/or the institution needed to recharge their batteries.

— The coach did something unethical.

— The coach lost his mojo (a criticism that surely applies to many tenured professors as well).

— Times and conditions changed (see below).

— Elon Musk got involved.

Yet none of these reasons was cited by Penn in announcing Donahue’s dismissal. Quite the contrary.

The real reason, at last

“I’m appreciative of Steve’s long tenure of leadership and service to Penn basketball and our student-athletes, both as an assistant and head coach,” gushed Penn’s athletic director Alanna Wren in her official announcement. “Steve has been steadfast in his commitment to the program and the development of our student-athletes. I’ve always had great respect for his commitment to Ivy values, and he has been a firm representative for Penn during his career.”

OK, OK— so in that case, why was he fired?

“Unfortunately,” Wren explained in her concluding paragraph, “the competitive success on the court has not been up to our standards. While difficult, a change in leadership is necessary to provide the championship caliber experience our student-athletes, alumni, and fans expect.”

Aha! The real reason, at last: Over the past two seasons, Donahue’s Penn basketball teams lost many more games than they won. They finished seventh in the Ivy League this past season. They’ve lost 13 consecutive games to Penn’s hated rival, Princeton.

This may have been a valuable educational experience for the players. As my Penn football teammates— an impressive collection of physicians, lawyers, financiers, educators, judges, even a movie actor— like to remind each other at our reunions, “You learn more from losing than from winning.” But it’s anathema to alumni and fans who rely on sports to inject a vicarious ray of sunshine into their otherwise miserable lives.

So, Wren’s verbose announcement can be boiled down as follows: “Our first priority is our alumni and fans, not our players. Now, will somebody please get these damned alumni off my back?”

A radical change

I barely knew Steve Donahue and often found him guilty of overcoaching: He was constantly shouting instructions from the sidelines to such an extent that his players sometime seemed more concerned about him than the action on the court. But Donahue did make a good first impression on me.

Shortly after he was hired as Penn’s head coach in 2015, Donahue participated with five other Penn coaches in a panel discussion during Alumni Weekend. At one point in the program, I asked a question from the floor about recruiting practices. The six coaches, including Donahue, all provided answers before fielding the next question. When the program ended, the other coaches departed, but Donahue sought me out to elaborate on his response. He didn’t know I was a journalist or anything else about me. He was genuinely interested in pursuing the subject.

In theory, the opportunity to play for such a dedicated coach— at an Ivy school, no less— should suffice to attract superior athletes. Penn’s 6-foot-9 center Nick Spinoso pretty much said it all last week when informed that Donahue and his assistants had been canned: “This coaching staff allowed me to play college basketball at a great university, so I will be forever grateful to them.”

Yet the nature of college sports did change radically during Donahue’s tenure at Penn. Thanks to rule changes by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, supposedly amateur athletes are now entitled to sell their “name, image, and likeness” and to easily transfer to colleges that encourage athletes to think of themselves as commodities for sale to the highest bidder— the antithesis of the Ivy ideal. Why any jock would forsake the prestige of an Ivy degree to play for St. John’s or Villanova is beyond me, but in fact over the past two seasons Penn lost the Ivy League’s player of the year as well as its top freshman player via the new “transfer portal” to those two schools.

This situation is hardly Donahue’s fault. It’s the fault of the Ivies and other similar schools for failing to make the case for athletics as an invaluable preparation for life. Nothing wrong with winning games, of course. But when it comes to learning to deal with the real adult world, adversity is probably the better teacher. High time, I say, for “real” universities to withdraw from the NCAA and form the NRCAA: that, is, the National Real-College Athletic Association.

Two kinds of athletes

My late friend Rocky Carzo spent 26 years as athletic director at Tufts— a major university that has deliberately chosen Division III status for athletics. That means Tufts doesn’t recruit any athletes whatsoever, and its students and alumni have better things to worry about than whether Tufts wins a game or loses. You might say Tufts is even more Ivy than the Ivies. What impressed me about Rocky was how, relieved of all pressure from alumni breathing down his neck, he was able to think exclusively about what’s best for students.

One small example: Rocky introduced a voluntary 7 a.m. faculty exercise class that was also open to students. This class kept professors and instructors physically fit, but it achieved something more: It enabled students to develop relationships with their teachers outside the classroom. And the 7 a.m. schedule assured that the class was never oversubscribed.

“There are two kinds of athletes,” Rocky was fond of observing. “One kind possess the God-given physical attributes. The other kind lack the God-given physical attributes and really have to work at their chosen sport. Those in the second group are much more interesting.” Those are the words of an educator blissfully relieved of alumni burdens.

Penn vs. Brown

When Grace Calhoun, a Brown alumna, became Penn’s athletic director in 2014, I asked her how she would characterize the difference between those two Ivy League schools. Without hesitation, she replied, “It’s the alumni. At Brown, the alumni don’t care about athletics. At Penn, they’re interested and involved.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.

She hesitated for perhaps two seconds before replying, “Oh, it’s definitely a good thing!”

As for me, I’m not so sure. And my doubts were reinforced when, just seven years later, Grace Calhoun left Penn to become athletic director at her alma mater.

Clark Kerr died in 2003, so he’s no longer here to remind us that he was kidding when he referred to “sports for the alumni.” He was only kidding, wasn’t he?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com