By David Hill

David Hill is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management.

After a tumultuous 12 months, Todd Turner has become a national spokesperson for academic reform at the top level of intercollegiate athletics—both through his work and through circumstance.

Six years into the post of Athletics Director at Vanderbilt University, the only private school in the highly competitive Southeastern Conference, Turner became the leader of the NCAA Division I Incentives/Disincentives Management Council Working Group, formed at the association’s 2003 convention. Through this work, he positioned himself at the forefront of a major movement to change academic standards for both individual student-athletes and institutions.

Then this past fall, Turner’s role at Vanderbilt was radically changed, in part because of athletic reform. Chancellor Gordon Gee dissolved Vanderbilt’s athletics department, putting intercollegiate sports under the direction of a vice chancellor for student affairs. Turner’s job as athletics director was eliminated and he was offered a post as a special assistant to Gee on matters of national athletics reform.

It was a shocking and controversial move. Gee said the change was a way of better integrating athletics into the university’s mainstream, and he hoped it would be an example other universities would follow. Turner, however, didn’t take the post, and instead left Vanderbilt. At the invitation of NCAA President Myles Brand, Turner remained Chair of the Working Group.

In this interview, Turner details why he didn’t take Gee’s offer. The decision has to do, he says, with what it truly means to be the leader of an athletics program at the highest level, especially in an era of reform and change. We also talked with Turner about his experiences as Athletics Director at North Carolina State University from 1990-96, his career, and the future of Division I-A intercollegiate athletics.

Q. Now that it has been several months since the restructuring of athletics at Vanderbilt, what do you think of the move? Is it a potential model for other universities?
A. I think a decision made at one school can be evaluated only in terms of how well it works there. There are only a handful of Division I-A universities that are similar to Vanderbilt. The vast majority of Division I-A members are large state universities, and their culture, their history, their processes are not ones that are going to make them able to copy the Vanderbilt model. For example, Vanderbilt is different from the University of Tennessee in its philosophy, its mission, and its makeup. They do compete on the athletic field but they’re entirely different.

Change is needed in intercollegiate athletics, but I think Vanderbilt has isolated itself. It may end up being a good example of reform, but then again, it may not. It’s so unique to Vanderbilt that it’s taken the university, in my opinion, out of being a factor in trying to lead change. I think Vanderbilt is trying to do what it thinks is best for Vanderbilt.

Gordon offered me the chance to stay at Vanderbilt and to work with him in bringing about additional reform. I chose not to do that because I felt Vanderbilt had lost its credibility, and to align myself with the model that had been implemented would make me ineffective. People would not take us seriously. And so I chose not to accept that position. Subsequently the NCAA invited me to continue chairing this [Incentives/Disincentives] committee that’s really dealing with the last piece of reform.

The post Chancellor Gee offered you seemed athletics-related but rather removed from athletics at the same time. Was that a concern of yours?
Not really. I was not that concerned about being out of the daily administration of athletics. I have a long, strong commitment to trying to bring about positive cultural changes in athletics, and if the position offered me a way to contribute, that would have been fine. I saw it, though, as an interim opportunity, something that wasn’t going to last forever. I just felt like it would be best for me personally to align myself differently—to still work in the area of cultural change—but do that without identifying myself with Vanderbilt’s model.

I don’t mean to say that this model won’t work at Vanderbilt. It might work at Vanderbilt. I hope it does. There are a lot of people invested in its success. They’ve got 300 students and a bunch of coaches and people who have given their lives to make this thing work. So let’s hope it does.

Are there some things Vanderbilt has done that you would hold up as more transferable examples?
Yes. One thing in particular, and this began long before Gordon arrived in 2000. In 1999, I think it was, we proposed to the Southeastern Conference that we tie the number of scholarships to the academic success of players. We got the conference to adopt that as proposed legislation it submitted to the NCAA Division I Management Council. Subsequently it was defeated, and the proposal that ended up carrying the day was one that is now controversial, the eight-five rule in men’s basketball [a program can’t sign more than five scholarship players in one year or more than eight in two years].

So we’ve been working on academic reform for a long time. I always felt it was the responsibility of schools like Vanderbilt to take a leadership role in the governance system, and through persistence and strong leadership to bring about some changes. The current leadership apparently has chosen to do it another way.

When the major changes in the Vanderbilt athletics structure were announced, what did you say to your coaches and other people in the department?
I didn’t have a lot of opportunity because the next day I was on administrative leave. But I did have a 15- to 20-minute session with the staff the day Gordon decided to make the change. And what I essentially told them was to carry on the good work that we had done. I said that Vanderbilt was a high-quality place and they had invested too much in making the programs strong to let a change in philosophy deter them. I thanked them for their support, because they’re the greatest. I hired all the head coaches but one, and every senior administrator, and I felt like we had a very cordial, effective, progressive team.

Did you try to hide or mask your disagreement with the changes?
It wasn’t appropriate for me to comment because that was more emotional. When the coaches have called, my whole point to them is, “You’ve invested too much in this, you need to make it work. You have got to make this work for Vanderbilt, you need to make it work for your program. So you’ve got to deal with it positively, no matter how great a challenge or change it is for you.” And I think most of the coaches have done that.

How were you involved in the evolution of the changes that Chancellor Gee made?
I was not involved at all. In fact, no one in the athletic department was involved at all. The coaches were not involved, the administrative staff was not involved. It was purely a senior management decision at Vanderbilt. To be honest with you, I was disappointed that we were not participants in the plan.

Is there anything you could have done to handle it differently?
In retrospect I probably could have done some things differently. [In early 2003,] Gordon chose to have the athletic director report to the vice chancellor, which is not the model that I was hired under, nor one that I believed was the best situation for a Division I-A athletic program. And I let him know as much. I told him that I could work under the new system and was happy to do so, but that I thought it would not be as effective, because it changes the role of the athletic director. I think that was sort of an initial indication that he had some different ideas in mind.

So might you have been a little more forceful or spent more time expressing your opinions to the university’s chief executive about that kind of arrangement?
I think I would have tried to be a little bit more interactive with a wider variety of people—other vice chancellors, other people with whom [Gee] works. One of the things that was a little bit of a surprise to me was that he wanted to make the change when the competitiveness of our programs, with the exception of maybe football, was improving. All the metrics were positive: Graduation rates and academic performances were strong, there were no NCAA [compliance] issues, and competitively, we were making obvious progress. His model is just inconsistent with what I was accustomed to, what I was hired under, and what was in place at all the schools we were competing against.

Why is the model that you had been hired under better?
I heard a talk that Myles Brand gave at the Division I-A athletic directors’ annual meeting in September, shortly after Gordon had made this change. He had two other college presidents on the panel with him. One was Gerald Turner from Southern Methodist University and the other was Bob Hemenway from Kansas. All three of them said that at Division I-A, to fully integrate athletics into the university system, the athletic director needs to be considered as a senior vice president who interacts on a daily basis with the other major administrative leaders at the university. The athletic director needs to report directly to the president and have regular access and participation. This includes being in daily communication with the president, particularly on key issues—hires, public relations issues, things like that. At this level, it’s gotten so big, it’s gotten so visible, that without that daily communication you’re rendered somewhat ineffective in trying to lead the program day-to-day.

Is that important because athletics is often the main public face of the institution?
It shouldn’t be that way, but unfortunately for many people it is. That’s a fact of life. You can’t change it. It’s gone too far down the road. You need to be able to harness it to work for you. Some universities are better at that than others.

It’s a complicated enterprise, and there are a lot of moving pieces to it. It’s somewhat outside the main mission of the university, so it creates tension on campus because resources get allocated to it that some think could be allocated more to the educational mission. But it’s a part of campus life, and you just have to learn how to deal with it. I think the best way to do that is to have the athletics director, particularly at this level, engaged in the daily life of governance as a senior official working in conjunction with the president and the vice chancellors or vice presidents.

It sounds as if an athletic director who is changing jobs or moving into the career has to make one of his or her prime considerations whether the other decision makers are going to be on the same page with him or her on these very important issues.
You’re absolutely correct. Absolutely correct.

In the past, how have you interacted with the chief executive?
I reported directly to the president, was on his senior management team, and met with the other direct-reports to the president on a daily basis. I also met with him regularly. That was also true at North Carolina State.

One-on-one meetings?
Yes. And I had meetings with the senior management team, the vice presidents and the chief financial officers of the university—where I was engaged in more than issues restricted to athletics. In that model, you’re engaged in institutional planning, prioritization, goal-setting, problem-solving—issues that go well beyond the athletics department. You bring the athletic perspective to it, but you might be dealing with issues of fund-raising, board of trustee relationships, relationships with legislators, governmental issues, or hiring policies.

In that model, does the athletic director brings his or her expertise and experience to some of these non-academic but crucial university administration activities?
Yes. You’re running a huge business, and you’ve got all the issues. But you’re doing it in the framework of higher education, and sometimes they’re in conflict. You still have to hire people, have fiscal responsibility, plan, manage, and have oversight. Being such a highly integrated system, the key components of it need to be in conversation with one another. And at the Division I-A level, like it or not, athletics is a major consumer of time, resources, and energy. And it’s highly, highly scrutinized.

So the athletic director needs to be part of that?
He or she needs to be, in my opinion, a participant in the global management decisions. By that, I mean he or she brings a perspective from a daily basis that the provost just can’t have. An athletics director is dealing with a very volatile external constituent group, highly visible students, and fiscal challenges that often ask universities to do unusual things like play football games on Thursday night. Without having an athletic administrator as part of senior management, the university misses input from a key component.

The perspective needs to be shared by someone who’s there on a daily basis, not by an absentee manager. That’s essentially what Vanderbilt did. It put athletics under a vice chancellor who is not involved in the daily operation at all. He thought he was, thought he knew all that goes on, but he can’t—there are too many things on his plate. There is no possible way he can know what was going on in football recruiting, or in the lives of the students or coaches or the conference. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for somebody to have broader duties and then try to know what’s happening in athletics. It just can’t happen at this level.

What can an athletic director do when he or she is in conflict with the chief executive and yet has to keep the athletic department headed in he right direction?
I never worried about that, honestly. I felt my responsibility was to manage the staff in athletics and to keep the chancellor informed proactively if there were issues he needed to be aware of. If there were key decisions with personnel that needed to be made, certainly he would be involved.

An athletic director at this level is supposed to have the expertise, the savvy, and the respect of his colleagues and community to know when to share information, how to share it, when to seek help, how to seek help, and how to contribute to other things that are going on at the institution.

Many Division I-A athletic directors say one way to maintain broad support for athletics is to listen to others on campus, particularly faculty, who have concerns about intercollegiate sports, and to take their views seriously. How important is that?
I think that’s an important element. This will surprise you, but compared to when I was at North Carolina State, I had less faculty interaction structurally at Vanderbilt. There was actually less faculty participation in what went on from a policy standpoint in athletics than any place I’ve ever been. I don’t know whether that was by design from the managers of the university or out of history and tradition, but it was a bit of a surprise to me.

I worked very closely with faculty at North Carolina State. I found they contributed very positively to our policy making and our thought processes in athletics. At N.C. State, we had an 11-member faculty committee of the athletics council, and I spent a lot of time with them and with the faculty rep talking about strategies, national issues, and processes on campus that impacted the lives of students.

Where do you think all of this reform discussion is going?
On a national basis, I think the reform movement has enough inertia that it’s going to be successful and it’s going to change a lot of the things that need to be changed in intercollegiate athletics. As far as Vanderbilt is concerned, it remains to be seen whether the administrative changes will work.

Do you think it’s up to Division I-A athletic directors to lead reform, or does it have to come directly from the institutional chief executives themselves?
I think it’s a combination of a lot of groups working together. Athletic directors have to implement, administer, and fine-tune the suggested rules so that they can work. But presidents need to be engaged in setting the tone: “This is what we want to see achieved, here are our goals.” The faculty also needs to have that kind of input. The boards of governors or trustees need to say, “This is what we want from athletics.” And the coaches also have to be on board. I think it’s a combination of many groups working together, with courage, to make this happen. And frankly, I think we’re well down the road to having that done.

There are basically four areas where reform has been focused, two of which have already been completed. One is changing the initial-eligibility standards. That’s been done, adopted, in place. The second is upgrading the progress standards for student-athletes, which is also in place. That’s the 40-60-80 percent of degree requirement [set for student-athletes entering their third, fourth, and fifth years of eligibility]. It’s unbelievably different and far more rigorous than ever before, and it’s good.

The third piece is developing some rewards and punishments tied to academic performance, and we’re well at work at that. That’s the committee I chair. I fully expect the Board of Directors of the NCAA to adopt what we’re going to suggest in April, which will further advance the issue of academic integrity and academic accountability.

Then the last step is to take a look at student-athlete time commitments. It’s on the agenda and there’s some work being done on that right now.

What are you doing right now?
I’m taking a sabbatical from the athletic world, with the exception of trying to finish my work with the incentives and disincentives group. I continue to interact with athletics directors, presidents, and others around the country relative to that. I’ve been making some visits to campuses to chat with leadership about not just academic reform but athletics in general. Essentially, I’m taking a bit of time away from the daily enterprise and refocusing. It’s kind of enjoyable, to be honest with you.

Do you want to be an athletics director again?
I think that’s certainly a possibility. But I would say this to you: There are only a few places I would like to be. I’m not the right person for every school, nor is every situation right for me. I’m really committed to a certain philosophy about the way athletics should work, how athletics should interact with the university community, what its role and mission is, and what kind of culture it should have. Some universities fit what I want to do, some don’t. Likewise, I’m a good fit some places, and I’m not a good fit other places.

You live in Nashville. Are you going to any Commodores games?
Oh, yeah. I’ve been to quite a few of them. I missed the Michigan game [in men’s basketball, which Vanderbilt won] because I was in North Carolina. But I went to a number of football games. I’m still the greatest fan you can possibly imagine of those coaches and those students.