Sport: Overhaul at Oberlin

Though J.W. Heisman of Heisman Trophy fame once served as the school's football coach (1892-94), Ohio's Oberlin College has always been better known for its string quartets than its quarterbacks. While the Oberlin Conservatory of Music was winning international acclaim, the athletic teams were losing so regularly that an independent study two years ago concluded that the sports program at the small (enrollment: 2,700) liberal arts college should either be scrapped or drastically overhauled. Oberlin's 36-year-old President Robert Fuller opted for the drastic -he appointed Jack Scott (TIME, May 24, 1971), 30, as athletic director and chairman of the physical education department.

Like most athletic directors, Scott is a former jock; he was a sprinter at Syracuse. But that is where the similarity ends. While covering the 1968 Olympics for Ramparts, he "tried to explain why blacks were angry and exploited as athletes." He briefly taught a course at the University of California called "Intercollegiate Athletics and Higher Education: A Socio-Psychologcal Evaluation" and founded the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society to "help interpret what's going on in sport and make it what it can and should be." Scott's two books, A thletics for Athletes and The Athletic Revolution, are so critical of racist, brutalizing, win-at-any-cost practices in college athletics that Spiro Agnew once rebuked him in a speech as an enemy of sport. Despite Scott's growing reputation as a radical, the University of Washington three years ago offered him a job as an assistant professor of physical education. A month later the offer was withdrawn. Scott sued and settled out of court for one year's salary: $10,500.

When Scott arrived at Oberlin last year, the reaction was surprisingly skittish for a liberal institution that prides itself on being the first white college to admit blacks (1835) and the first college to graduate women (1837): four of the 14 staffers in the athletic department, including the football and basketball coaches, resigned. "Sports will be destroyed at Oberlin," one coach warned darkly. Scott, noting that the

Oberlin football team had gone winless in eight games the season before he arrived, had an obvious rejoinder: "How can we destroy sports with a record like that? We have nowhere to go but up." Describing himself as a "radical populist," Scott insists that his aim is not to de-emphasize but to "democratize" sports. In an odd non sequitur, he adds: "What no one realizes is that I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and read Ayn Rand."

Nonetheless, Scott rattled the traditionalists when he hired Tommie Smith (the sprinter who is best remembered for his clenched-fist salute on the victory stand after he won the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics) as track and basketball coach. Last week, in keeping with his crusade to help blacks "become involved in the brains of sport, not just the brawn,", he appointed Cass Jackson as football coach. Of Smith, Scott says: "He's a pretty quiet, dignified guy. He is not a black-power person who's going to blow up the gymnasium with a hand grenade. He wants to build winning teams."