College President James Freedman has named Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg the new chair of the National Collegiate Athletic Association certification steering committee.
The College is in the midst of a yearlong evaluation of its athletic program to ensure its compliance with new NCAA requirements. The evaluation began in the fall.
The NCAA determines whether the College should receive certification, conditional certification or no certification based on the report the College submits and a field visit.
Furstenberg will replace Deputy Provost Bruce Pipes, who chaired the NCAA certification steering committee before he left the College at the end of last term to become dean of the college at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.
The NCAA approved a new certification process in 1993 that evaluates all NCAA Division I institutions.
"All Division I schools would go through a new certification process that would assure they meet certain sets of standards in four major areas," Pipes said.
"The NCAA guidelines for the certification process ask us to study four areas: Governance and Commitment to Rules Compliance, Academic Integrity, Fiscal Integrity and Commitment to Equity," Assistant Dean of the College Katherine Burkewrote in an e-mail message.
The purpose of the steering committee is to oversee the four subcommittees and integrate their individual reports into a comprehensive report that the NCAA evaluates, Pipes said.
Deputy Athletics Director Robert Ceplikas said, "The NCAA prescribes the format to follow and puts out a handbook" outlining the guidelines the College must follow while conducting its evaluation.
The steering committee has formed four subcommittees, one for each of the four NCAA specified areas. Each subcommittee will make a report in the Spring term.
Those four reports will be combined into the one report that will be presented to the NCAA, Pipes said.
The report submitted to the NCAA is then evaluated by an outside review committee comprised of administration of comparable institutions.
In the spring or summer members from the NCAA panel "will come to the College and interview" persons related to the athletics department, Pipes said.
The problem most schools encounter is with the area of gender equity.
Dartmouth embarked on its own gender equity evaluation three years ago, making gender equality in athletics one of the College's strongest assets, Ceplikas said.
"We are way ahead of most NCAAs in sports offerings for men and women student-athletes," Ceplikas said. "The Ivy League tends to be ahead of most schools already, but the internal study that we did enabled us to fine-tune our program and make sure we don't leave any stones unturned."
As part of the athletic department's efforts to enhance gender equity, they have upgraded two women's sports, volleyball and softball, to fully-funded varsity sports, Ceplikas said.
The men's volleyball team was downgraded from fully-funded varsity status to club status, he said.
The College currently has 16 women's varsity sports teams and 16 men's varsity sports teams. The athletic department told the Dartmouth last winter that it projects that 45 percent of varsity athletes will be female in the 1996-1997 academic year.
Furstenberg declined to comment on his new role.
