A recent survey by The Chronicle suggests that the public supports intercollegiate athletics programs far less than most college leaders believe and that the time has come when serious change in college sports might actually be possible. But can we truly reform college sports? For years, we have attempted that and failed, as I know only too well from personal experience.

Three decades ago, in 1973, Alden Dunham, then an officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and I, then the executive vice president of the College Board, had several informal conversations bemoaning the sorry state of intercollegiate athletics: its crass commercialism and growing "win at any cost" professionalism. Carnegie had issued a seminal report on the subject in 1929, and Dunham thought it was well past time for a reprise. He proposed that I conduct an inquiry into the need for a national study of college sports on behalf of the American Council on Education.

With the support of Carnegie and the Ford Foundation, several colleagues and I spent six months exploring all aspects of college athletics and submitted our report, totaling some 397 pages including appendices, to ACE in April 1974. We identified a number of critical problem areas, among them the advent of Title IX, the exploitation of minority athletes, the growth of professional sports, the influence of television, and the trickle-down effect of the competitive excesses in the major big-time sports on the "minor" collegiate ones and on secondary-school athletics. We concluded that an extensive follow-up study was needed to find solutions, and we prepared a proposal for ACE to submit to Carnegie requesting $1.8-million to undertake the task. It did not take long for the disillusionment that I have experienced over the years since then to set in.

The reactions to the report ranged widely. The National Collegiate Athletic Association complained that, while the report was motivated by good intentions, it was based largely on fantasy or preconceived opinions -- that we were outsiders who didn't know what we were doing. The president of a big-time athletic power commented, "Amateurs shouldn't get involved in things they don't know anything about." (His institution happened to be on probation for rules violations with the NCAA.)

At the same time, it was hard not to get a swelled head from adjectives such as "powerful," "landmark," "brilliant," "penetrating," which appeared in news publications, books, and personal letters. The press-relations officer at the Carnegie Corporation observed that no single Carnegie-sponsored project had generated more business for its newspaper clipping service. The author James Michener, who was then working on Sports in America, wrote, "In every area Hanford pinpointed the hot issues. ... His slim report should be published for the national audience ... and no one should make decisions in this field without consulting it."

But some reviewers thought we had pulled our punches -- that we had been far too easy on the intercollegiate-athletics establishment. Richard Margolis observed in the November 1974 issue of Change magazine, "He [Hanford] is less polemicist than administrator -- which may be why he presents us with a 'balanced' analysis that never flies. ... Page upon page of pros and cons, all equally weighted. No maladies are deplored; no remedies prescribed." In fact, even my wife told me that I had failed to "tell it like it is."

Yet we had been asked to produce an analytical treatise, not an exposé. It did not seem to make sense, then, to offend the educational establishment with which I was associated. In other words, while we called attention to 15 specific examples of excess, all of which had been previously reported in the press, I chose not to sensationalize them. Nor did I think we needed to uncover some more new dirt; I felt that what we had reported was sensational and dirty enough as it was.

The Carnegie Corporation's response was most disappointing. While the staff was excited about the prospect of sponsoring the study we had recommended, the trustees were not. Influenced by the Eastern-establishment bias, they simply could not accept the proposition that anything as messy as big-time intercollegiate athletics was an important part of the nation's social fabric. Trying to clean up that mess just wasn't worthwhile to them.

Ultimately, they voted to set aside only a meager $200,000 to match whatever ACE came up with. And, for their part, many of the institutional presidents in ACE's membership weren't interested in looking for a philanthropic match. They believed they had more compelling needs on which to spend money -- a clear signal that they wanted to let sleeping dogs lie.

Such developments following the publication of our report led me to three disillusioning conclusions. One, the NCAA was not about to admit that anything was seriously wrong with intercollegiate athletics. Two, presidents were turning their backs on the problems in their sports programs. And three, foundations were not about to dirty their hands dealing with anything as unsavory as college sports.

Thirty years later, has anything changed? Is the NCAA in control? Not by a long shot. In the last decade, the almighty dollar has reigned even more supreme, as bowl games have been manipulated, conferences have been realigned, and coaches' salaries have escalated. At the same time, officials at the athletic conferences are not interested in having the NCAA invade their increasingly lucrative turf. Furthermore, it is not the healthiest of circumstances when a single agency, the NCAA, acts as the primary organizing body and legislative authority, the police force and the prosecutor, the judge and the jury in overseeing the conduct of college sports in America.

Are the presidents in control on their own campuses? The litany of rules violations, as reflected in the number of institutions on probation with the NCAA, suggests that they are not -- that the chicanery indulged in by trustees, alumni, athletics administrators, and athletes persists under the not-so-watchful eyes of many college leaders. Like their predecessors, today's chief executives want to avoid the whole bloody mess; they do just enough to ease their consciences and appear sufficiently involved to keep critics at bay.

And what about the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which issued its first report in 1991 and a second one in 2001, and which now plans to reconvene, yet again, in the near future? According to its Web site, it has pursued an agenda built around a central recommendation: presidential control of college sports. But while many of its suggestions are reasonable, they treat only the symptoms of the problem, not the root causes. That should be no surprise. The commission has always been heavily loaded with representatives of higher education who have vested interests in college sports. Moreover, like the NCAA, having members of a fraternity judge the integrity of its brothers doesn't make sense.

There are many reasons why college sports remains in serious disarray, but one of the most important is that no one has been willing to call a cancer a cancer -- that is, to decry the rampant commercialism of big-time college sports, the denigration of academic values in the interests of athletic ends, and the unethical means that "friends" of a given sport (coaches, faculty members, alumni, and local businessmen) employ to recruit and financially support athletic talent. I know. I had the opportunity in 1973 and 1974 and did not. I worried about offending the educational establishment with which I was associated and instead created the impression that what I knew to be a cancer was perhaps only a headache.

My own experience aside, it is difficult to speak the "awful truth" about big-time college sports. Those programs have the public's eye and generate loyalty and support among people throughout the country that is akin to patriotism. That is why it is hard for any individual or commission within higher education to generate much more than palliatives, not real reform. The recent Chronicle survey gives new hope, however, that the public may now be much more interested in change than many higher-education leaders may have realized.

But to begin to find the cure, we can't look to the same old organizations and groupsthe usual suspectslike the Knight Commission. We need to establish a truly independent, unbiased body outside the educational and athletics establishment that could take a serious, in-depth look at big-time intercollegiate athletics within the context of the role of sports in the broader society. That last qualification is crucial. Sports are said to reflect the societies in which they exist, and many problems that attend intercollegiate athletics are manifestations of similar ones that exist in our society today. They should be dealt with in that context.

For instance, is not the crass commercialization of college sports but one manifestation of society's worship of the dollar as evident in the case of Enron or WorldCom? Is not the star basketball player's perfecting his slam dunk instead of focusing on teamwork akin to the corporate executive's leaving a company that nurtured him for a more lucrative post elsewhere? In the matter of social equality, is the preponderance of black athletes in big-time football and basketball evidence of the success of the civil-rights movement or the exploitation of minority students? What about Americans' physical health? One of our society's problems is obesity, which comes in part from sitting around watching sports, not participating in them. These are just a few of the ways that the abuses in college athletics are connected to far broader societal concerns.

Any group established to deal with those issues from that broader perspective should therefore include not only representatives of the professional, collegiate, and secondary-school athletic establishment, but also recognized leaders from the fields of sociology, philosophy, psychology, medicine, law, business, and religion. It should be chaired by someone with impeccable credentials, like a Supreme Court justice, and include public-spirited individuals with enough credibility and stature that college leaders and the public would truly listen to them. An organization like the American Council on Education should once again take the lead in organizing such an effort and seek sponsorship from a major foundation.

Almost 75 years after Carnegie's first report, we must finally come to terms with intercollegiate athletics. Before it's far too late, we need people who are willing to speak the truth about college sports -- and to take the heat for having done so.

George H. Hanford is president emeritus of the College Board.