The Ivy Group’s eight colleges and universities sport almost perfect graduation rates for student-athletes, almost no visits from the NCAA enforcement office and few behavioral issues. Pretty cushy for the conference commissioner, right?

Well, first of all, Jeff Orleans is an executive director, not a commissioner. When the schools configured 51 years ago, the founding presidents wanted to distinguish their athletics model from the excesses and problems they saw elsewhere at the time. So they wanted a different name for that position, and they wanted whoever filled it to toe a different line.

Secondly, the Ivy schools are a group, not a conference. Oh, they answer to Ivy League, but officially they go by the Council of Ivy Group Presidents – or Ivy Group for short – again because the presidents wanted to make clear that their association together was broader than just an athletics league.

Now if all that sounds snooty, know this: The Ivy Group ranked eighth in NACDA’s last Directors’ Cup. Not bad for a group that prides itself on success off the fields and courts.

Don’t credit Orleans – he won’t let you, preferring instead to praise the schools and the student-athletes who balance athletics competition with educational pursuits, just like the NCAA mission says.

“The key is to remember that we have college athletics in the first place because we believe this activity is part of a student’s academic and developmental education, not somehow opposed to the rest of his or her experience,” Orleans said.

To Orleans, that means Ivy expectations in academics and athletics are parallel. The Ivy Group’s admissions standards, academic expectations and athletics rules are meant to assure that student-athletes are in a position to learn in the classroom and in the rest of their campus lives. The schools also try to provide the resources and opportunities for competitive athletics success, because seeking that success is how students learn through athletics, Orleans said.

“We think those are complementary activities, not contradictory ones. Shaping athletics is thus just like shaping any other part of undergraduate life for which the institution is responsible, whether in curricular offerings and requirements or in deciding what living arrangements best help students have a good college experience,” he said. “What would be odd is if the college didn’t focus on those issues, not that it does focus on them.”

Orleans matriculated to his position in 1984 after a 13-year career in law. The Yale University law school graduate served as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Office for Civil Rights and in the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1971 to 1975. Then he was special assistant to the president in the University of North Carolina system from 1975 to 1984, where he helped oversee implementation of the system’s 16-campus desegregation plan and also had other “university counsel” responsibilities.

He was looking for a new challenge in 1984 when a friend told him about the Ivy opening.

“It was an opportunity to stay in higher education even though I was leaving the law,” Orleans said. “And it allowed me to do so in what I thought was a unique way – to take the passion and drive of athletics, which I’ve always felt were important and fun, and work with them in an association that wanted to be sure athletics wasn’t separate from a college student’s educational experience.”

It also was a chance for Orleans to build the Ivy office from the ground up. When he walked in the door, there was but one co-worker to greet him. Today, Orleans is joined by three associate directors, three interns and two administrative support staff.

To be sure, they and their corresponding staff members at Ivy institutions have been active in NCAA governance. Last year alone, Orleans said, almost two dozen Ivy administrators and coaches served on governance and sport committees, including the chairs of the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee and the Division I Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet.

They’ve also contributed in all areas of the Management Council’s work over time. Orleans played a central part in negotiating championship and revenue protections in the Division I “restructuring” change in the 1990s, and Senior Associate Director Carolyn Campbell-McGovern was a key figure in designing the diversity protections in the governance structure revision Division I adopted this year.

But as good as the staff and school involvement in NCAA governance has been, even that isn’t what makes Orleans really tick.

“I’m most proud of the students we represent,” he said, “which is the answer I think any conference administrator will give. Our students not only excel academically and athletically, but in every other way as well. That is so clear in the Ivy Student-Athlete Advisory Committee meetings that I attend – how smart, perceptive and disciplined our student-athletes are – and also how funny they can be.”

Orleans points to a diverse set of accolades for Ivy students as an example. In 2007, an Ivy student-athlete was named ice hockey’s Humanitarian of the Year for the third time in five years. Also, an Ivy player was named the Kazmaier Award winner as the outstanding women’s ice hockey player for the sixth time in 10 years (as well as a second-team national Academic All-American), and an Ivy player was the first winner of the Hines “Unsung Hero” Award in men’s ice hockey.

The Ivy League also has contributed many acclaimed individual student-athletes, coaches and alumni throughout its history. At the 2007 NCAA Convention, the Ivy Group had three Silver Anniversary recipients plus a Top VIII winner, and in 2006 it was the first conference to have recipients of all four major NCAA awards – including the Theodore Roosevelt and the Inspiration Award – in the same year.

“To me, our success in all aspects of the educational experience – including athletics – epitomizes the character and achievement of our student-athletes,” Orleans said. “I’m proud that we have a hand in shaping what they do and in giving them the opportunities to succeed in all aspects of their lives.”

Right place, right time:
Orleans present at birth of Title IX

Jeff Orleans had been a federal lawyer for just one year before Title IX was passed.

It was a time when a number of new statutes and court cases suddenly expanded the jurisdiction of his employer – the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Office for Civil Rights – over higher education, secondary education and elementary education all at once. So he and other relatively “green” lawyers were thrust into fairly responsible roles perhaps a lot earlier than they might have at other agencies or at other times.

“I had the great fortune as a very new federal lawyer to be part of the core group that drafted the original implementing Title IX regulation, not just in athletics but as it applied to all of higher education,” Orleans said. “It was exhilarating to start with this brief statute and to know that we were going to fundamentally expand educational opportunity for the entire country.”

Thirty-five years later, Orleans said it is “perverse” that the nation continues to debate the law rather than celebrate its success.

“At Title IX’s 35th anniversary, we ought to be celebrating a revolution in women’s opportunities together with the continued health in men’s sports – all those forecasts of doom for football were just 180 degrees wrong – and instead we’re still fighting and feeling unfulfilled.

“I believe that’s because no administration of either party has been willing to show leadership or any kind of enforcement in this area. So we don’t have either a ‘neutral’ sense of how far we’ve come, or a sense of urgency in how far we still need to come. Instead, we have debates between advocates, but no authoritative voice in the center that can bring people together.

“What’s left to do is very doable, we just need a different kind of priority and attention than we’ve gotten, and after so many years the government seems to have other priorities.”

Q&A with Jeff Orleans

Your background is so entrenched in law that it seems curious for you to have answered an athletics-based calling. What attracted you to your current position?

I was a lawyer in higher education, with four years in civil rights in the government and then nine years in the University of North Carolina system. For me, this was an opportunity to stay in higher education even though I was leaving the law – and in what I thought was a unique way, which was the chance to take the passion and drive of athletics, which I’ve always felt were important and fun, and work with them in a league that wanted to be sure that athletics stayed part of a college student’s educational experience. As anyone in a league office feels, it was a chance to represent thousands of young people and have an influence on their lives – and it was a chance to build the structure from the ground up (in fall 1984), because the office had just one person there at the time. So it was attractive on a number of levels – it was staying in higher education, coming into athletics, working in this environment, and building the office and having an impact as a league administrator.

The Ivy League has almost perfect graduation rates for student-athletes, almost no visits from the NCAA enforcement office and few behavioral issues. The media often refer to the Ivy League as the model by which all NCAA conferences and schools should behave off the fields and courts. Yet they also seem to throw in – almost as an afterthought – the fact that the Ivies play some pretty good competitive sports. Given that perception, how do you in your role keep athletics valued in one of the most intense academic environments of all?

The key is in why we have college athletics in the first place, not just in the Ivy Group but everywhere. We believe that athletics really is a part of the student’s full education – we don’t think it’s opposed to academic or personal development for students. So for me, both the kind of personal education focus with which the Ivy presidents start, and the traditional competitive focus of athletics, are really directed toward the same thing – which is that we have these great young men and women at our schools and we want to help them grow up in the best possible ways and help them develop their talents and succeed.

I see the rules that we have for admissions and academic expectations as the same kind of rules you would have for any kind of educational activity, such as decisions a school has to make about how many courses you need for a major, what goes into a curriculum – these are all the kinds of decisions a president and faculty should make. And on the other hand, we try to provide the kind of resources and opportunities that will let our athletes succeed, because the way you learn in athletics is by trying and succeeding – or trying and not succeeding and then trying again – to do that athletically while you’re doing everything else you’re doing academically and personally. So I see the academic and athletic focus as parallel or complementary.

The press often makes it seem that you have to choose between athletics and the rest of the college experience. My sense is that most coaches on most campuses, no matter how much they want to win, don’t want their athletes to choose in this way. Perhaps the Ivy Group gets more attention because we are more self-conscious about some of our approaches, but in college athletics overall – especially in the less visible sports –I think that people fundamentally all want to accomplish just what we’re trying to accomplish. The NCAA tagline of “going pro in something other than sports” is not an exaggeration. Coaches in the Ivy Group want their student-athletes to graduate able to “go pro” in whatever non-athletic field they’re going to choose, and I think coaches in other leagues want that also.

Does that mean there isn’t as much difference as people think between the Ivies and other leagues, at least in how they view the integration of athletics into the educational mission?

That’s right in a sense. The Ivy Group includes an unusual group of institutions in that we’re very selective, relatively small, very visible, and we tend to draw national and international student bodies. So we feel we need to focus on what we need to do to ensure that when we sponsor athletics, we don’t let the activity overwhelm the academic aspects of being in college. But I don’t think most coaches and athletics administrators on most campuses want athletics to overwhelm their students; it’s just that the Ivy Group was formed in a particular way that drew attention to that goal. We are different in some ways – but the underlying goal is the same: it’s just that we have a structure that we think we need to use at our campuses that is different than the ones other campuses use.

Do you ever feel like that structure doesn’t emphasize athletics enough?

Not at all. The last year for which NACDA released the complete Division I rankings, we as a conference were eighth of 31. That seems pretty competitive to me. The people against whom we compete certainly respect us, but it is harder in the national media to attract attention if you’re not a standout BCS conference – it’s hard to get a reputation. That’s frustrating to me because we’re trying to recruit the very best student-athletes we can, and if a wonderful young person for whatever reason doesn’t appreciate our athletic competitiveness and chooses to attend another school – a great school, in which he can be happy – if he is someone that our coaches and admissions deans hoped would come to an Ivy campus, then I’m frustrated. But I’m not alone in that feeling – there are 20 other commissioners who feel that they are competing in the shadow of eight or 10 dominant conferences.

What’s the primary contributor to the balance of academics and athletics in the Ivy Group? Why isn’t there an arms race in recruiting and facilities there?

Part of it is that our athletics departments get higher percentages of their budgets from the regular academic funding process than at most other Division I institutions. So there’s that natural check that says the athletics budget will be allocated along with chemistry, music and French, even if you raise a lot of money outside. On the other hand, because there is central budgeting, and because we have such broad programs, there’s a real discipline not to be lavish. For example, we have seven schools among the top 10 in number of sports sponsored, and our eighth is between 11-20. The average number of NCAA sports sponsored at Ivy members is 34 – and we have 33 championship sports. No other league comes close to that, or to our number of student-athletes for that matter.

Has there ever been talk within the Ivy Group about instituting athletics scholarships?

Not in my experience, for a couple of reasons. One is that our institutions award very little non-need aid for any reason, simply from a basic view at each of the schools that emphasizes wide access for all students through need-based aid, and also emphasizes the idea that students shouldn’t feel they are valued more or less depending on who they are or what their activities are. Second is that even though our schools do award really extensive need-based aid already, it would be a very large expenditure to endow the difference between what we currently award and what grants in aid would require, because we do have such broad programs, and again our schools would want to direct those funds to need-based aid.

Are you tempted to think the no-scholarship paradigm would work elsewhere in Division I or II?

I was on the original financial aid committee in the mid-1980s that actually recommended a modified basis of need-based aid. There are two issues we identified then – one of which is solvable and another that is more difficult.

The solvable one is the administrative issue of making sure everyone does only what they are supposed to do in awarding need-based aid. That seemed insurmountable 20 years ago. Today, with the Web and the “common application” and the experience we have in determining NCAA initial eligibility, if one were careful and didn’t try to be too subtle in how you design a need-based system, you could do it, especially if you provided the software to the conference offices so that they would be the first monitors of financial aid. People would have to get used to it, but it’s do-able.

What’s more difficult is the cost difference between different kinds of institutions – and every one of the three divisions has a significant mix of institutions – which can change the competitive balance among schools. That seems to me to be one of the reasons why Division III has become much more careful in the last few years about its ways of defining and accounting for need-based aid. So that’s the issue we would have with need-based aid in Division I – it would be difficult to avoid changes in the competitive balance.

You were involved at the ground level of Title IX. Talk about your involvement with the legislation.

I had been a federal lawyer for a year before Title IX was passed, and it was a time when there were five or six statutes or court cases that suddenly expanded the jurisdiction of the HEW over higher education, secondary education and elementary education all at once. So those of us who were pretty new lawyers got thrust into fairly responsible roles probably a lot earlier than we might have at other agencies or at other times. So I wound up as part of the small core group that drafted the Title IX regulation not just for athletics, but for admissions, financial aid, extracurricular activities and employment. It was exhilarating because we knew we were going to change educational opportunity in the country in a positive way.

How would you characterize the current state of affairs regarding Title IX and its impact on college sports?

Last summer was the 35th anniversary of the statute, and I’ve had two strong thoughts thinking about it. One is remembering all the dire predictions that covering athletics under Title IX would be the end of football. Well, looking at the athletics landscape today, it would be hard to conclude that college football is dead. On the other hand, you would think that 35 years later, with so much growth in girls’ and women’s athletics at every level, that we would be at peace with this and feeling – men and women alike – that we had accomplished something wonderful and that we were moving on together. I find it perverse that there’s still so much discord on both sides. The reason for that, I believe, is that the Office for Civil Rights under both Republicans and Democrats has consistently not given athletics enforcement any priority. If you have enforcement and regulation, and people are essentially complying as a consequence, you get authoritative judgments that – well, 95 percent of colleges and universities are in compliance and everyone can feel good about that, and the 5 percent that aren’t in compliance get a sense that they better get in compliance or they will be sued. That would give you the sense that the situation is under control. We don’t have that kind of neutral supervision by the government that can either pat you on the back or tell you that you haven’t hit the mark. So we have people talking past each other about these issues instead of central leadership that brings people together. If you look at what has happened over the last 35 years, there is a lot to celebrate, but people remain suspicious in ways I think are unfortunate.

What’s your favorite Ivy Group athletics event?

Any baseball or softball game on a sunny afternoon. Actually, on any afternoon. Especially a doubleheader…..