When Paul Haagen played lacrosse at Haverford, weight-training equipment consisted of a well-worn Universal machine. Free weights were pipes with cement-filled cans on either end.

He wouldn’t have had it any other way. Like most Haverford student-athletes, Haagen found something at Haverford so golden, so special, that a primitive weight room didn’t really matter. More than 30 years later, as a law professor at Duke, he has some different thoughts and feelings about Haverford’s facilities, but more on that later.

“I’ll say right up front that I was not a standout athlete at Haverford College,” Haagen admits, “but my time at Haverford was an incredibly happy, intellectually intense opportunity to grow as a person. Haverford permitted me to do a lot of different things, to experiment and explore different aspects of my personality and skills in a way that didn’t require any posturing. It was an altogether authentic experience. I could be who I was without apology. I switched majors a couple of times, I chaired the Honor Council—which was very important to me. I played lacrosse and I’d never played before. The people I found on the lacrosse team had intellectual and personal skills dramatically different from my own. The captain of the team taught me how to handle myself in certain situations. I was the smallest person on the lacrosse team, and we were given a set of extremely high expectations. There were no compromises about anything.”

That no-compromise stance was upheld in academic life, as well. A religion major, Haagen recalls being “really pushed” by the history and religion departments at Haverford. Haagen knew what life at a liberal arts college would demand of him. He was born in Lancaster, Pa., but was raised in Middletown, Ct.; his father taught at Wesleyan. After attending Mount Hermon, Haagen set his sights on Stanford, Yale, and Swarthmore. After interviewing at Swat and hating it (“They told me I’d be happier working for Cs than I would be working for As elsewhere . . . and all the tour guide could talk about were the great parties where everyone would get wasted.”), he interviewed at Haverford. A friend of his father’s was a member of the Haverford faculty. “The place just resonated with me personally,” he recalls, “and I applied Early Decision. I immediately liked the look and feel of it. At Haverford, everyone talked to me about the work they were doing, the projects they were involved with. It was serious without being pretentious. There was a terrific variety of experiences open to me and the ease with which I could move from world to world within those experiences was an incredibly important formative phase for me.”

If Haagen’s academic credentials are any indication, his desire for learning was encouraged and nurtured at Haverford. After graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with high honors in religion, he went on to study as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford. He also earned degrees at Princeton (master’s and Ph.D.) and Yale (J.D.). He studied history first at Oxford and then pursued it at Princeton. At Yale, he was editor of the Yale Law and Policy Review and an editor of the Yale Journal of World Public Order. After Yale, he clerked on the United States Court of Appeals before doing a two-year stint at Dechert Price and Rhoads in Philadelphia. He joined the Duke Law faculty in 1985.

At Duke School of Law he teaches contracts, American legal history, and a course called “Sports and the Law.” He continues to research, publish, and deliver speeches on debt law, imprisonment for debt, “contracting around”—the use of voluntary instruments to contract out of legal matters. He is involved in Duke’s international programs in Cambridge, Mexico City, Brussels, Geneva, and Hong Kong, among others. And his committee work makes a more-than-generous swath through the roster of university (Academic Council, University Judicial Board, Faculty Hearing, Rhodes Scholarship, Faculty Compensation, for example) and law school (Clerkship, Curriculum Review, Financial Aid, and Library, to name a few) committees. He lives in Durham with his wife and their two children; his son, Chris, is a freshman at Haverford this year.

In light of all of the discussion and debate (and some would say furor) surrounding The Game of Life (2000) and Reclaiming the Game (2003), books by former Princeton president William G. Bowen, Haagen is in a good position to make assessments with an eye trained for historical perspective. Bowen has examined athletics and academic performance at the Ivies and other elite institutions. He decries the professionalism of sport at the collegiate level and believes elite institutions are headed down the wrong path in actively recruiting athletes to compete against powerhouse athletic programs around the country. The increased professionalism of collegiate sports, he argues, is not consonant with the intense academic inquiry—and the resources dedicated to that inquiry—at the country’s most selective colleges and universities. He hammers home bullet points, citing relaxed admissions standards for athletes and academic underperformance once those athletes get in. He argues that elite institutions can ill afford to set aside “slots” for specialized athletes who do not have sufficient academic credentials to be admitted in the first place—and who often don’t have the time or academic prowess to succeed once they’re part of the academic community.

In a recent article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Bowen said “We find that [incoming Princeton] students who make it onto the coaches’ lists are students who are not only talented athletically, but have a focus and a commitment that in some instances borders on single-mindedness, to the sport, and perhaps to the coach and to the team. That inevitably affects how they allocate their time, what they think about when they wake up in the morning and are in the shower, what they choose to do with the extra half hour that somehow appears in the day.

“At some of these schools, there are not just a few people occupying these places, but lots of people. They’re occupying places that could have gone, in many instances, to very well-rounded students, many of whom want to play sports, but who also are eager to take full advantage of a very scarce educational resource. Princeton is a very privileged place. I would argue that it has an obligation to want to have its extraordinary educational resources utilized to the fullest. I’m not just talking about grades here. It’s about going to the odd lecture, participating in some new extracurricular activity, being part of a liberal-arts community. It’s just hard for me to see how you justify assigning so many places at an educational institution to folks who seem to have a different agenda.”

Bowen’s critics—and there are many—believe his stance is elitist and does not take into account the positive attributes athletes bring to higher education. Haagen is one of those critics.

“What Bowen misses,” he says, “is the fact that at elite institutions, athletes come with skill sets that are socially prized. They graduate and function as citizens of the republic and do positive things. The reach positions of leadership and foster teamwork and loyalty. We should take this very seriously. We need to tell a new story about who athletes are in the context of higher education.”

Part of that context, he feels, is informed by history. As Haagen is quick to point out, “virtually everything we worry and talk about today appeared extremely early in the process. By 1905, people were concerned about wildly different entrance values, commercialization, specialized treatment of players, misallocated funds, and institutional image. The dynamic of competition was part of that. Sports were projected as ‘appropriate.’ These were men of action, ensuring that athletics were part of the institution, and Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were the critical players.”

Stepping back from institutional athletics to see how society treats athletics is an important part of understanding current problems, according to Haagen. “Commitment to activity is coming much earlier,” he says. “When football first became a big part of college life, people were just learning football. The players used to be big, strong people, not professional athletes recruited to be on the team so they could compete against other professional athletes.” One of the keys to understanding the athlete’s place in higher education, he says, is understanding or at least recognizing that athletes do learn. “It’s education as performance,” he says. “I would not advise you to get into a situation where you’re pretending that athletics are extracurricular. You need to have curricular components, and what are they going to be?

“What is changing in the current environment is an increased pressure on institutions to understand the balance between a high public interest in certain sports and things like Title IX. There is inherent risk in the high levels of money involved. How do the elite institutions respond to the misallocation of resources?”

On the Division III level, Haagan acknowledges, things play out much differently. “Division III faces two dramatically different sets of problems,” he says. “On one hand, there is a push for a different articulation of athletics—as part of a balanced, integrated life. You stress participation, the fact that athletes can do other things in their lives, they can integrate activities and scholarship. The other model is very different: athletics as a way of doing something that attracts different people to the institution. There are very strong feelings around this issue, but people clearly believe there is a payoff. You have kids in organized leagues and on traveling teams at a very early age. People believe in the benefits of early physical activity, the work ethic, the teamwork, the development of leadership skills, all the good things. In higher education, you just have to make it have intellectual, academic sense within the institution and the things you’re trying to do.

“What research was starting to show that the big athletic programs were starting to lose balance. A high percentage of athletes were starting to perform poorly in the classroom. There was anecdotal evidence that athletes were part of a negative experience on campus—they were going through as a group with little positive interaction with other students and faculty. That’s not an issue at Haverford, but it’s an illustration of what was going on at the some of the big programs.”

Outside of his work at Duke, Haagen does some international sports consulting. He has become an expert on blood-doping investigation and international competition, working with U.S.A. Track & Field to guide athletes through the procedural protections in this arena. Because of its well-established procedural protections for athletes, Haagen says, the United States has become somewhat demonized by other groups who insinuate that the U.S. protections are a coverup.

Haagen also works with Arn Tellem ’76 to counsel student-athletes at Duke. As chair of Duke’s Student-Athlete Counseling Committee, he has worked with the likes of Grant Hill, Cherokee Parks, and Shane Battier as these student-athletes made the transition from student-athlete to professional athlete. Duke’s counseling effort is one of the most expansive programs in the country; it’s relatively rare that a university will seek collaboration with professionals outside its own athletic department. It’s rarer still to find a program involving outside professionals in a substantive way to improve the counseling and agent-selection process. Family, friends, and coaches are part of that process, too, and Duke’s committee is progressive enough to include them. It’s up to the student-athlete to decide how much support, how much advice is supplied. “We’re preparing these student-athletes for life,” Haagen says, “and the challenges and opposition that await them. They’re about to deal with the big business of professional sports, contracts, endorsements, and professional sports agents. A number of schools have professional sports counseling committees, but these committees are ‘procedural’ rather than ‘substantive.’ My understanding of the distinction is that most committees merely attempt to get agents to meet certain minimal registration requirements, but do not attempt any serious counseling of athletes.”

In early October, Haagen was at Haverford to discuss his work at Duke in presentations for classes, and for Haverford athletic and other staff. He also met with pre-law students and Rhodes candidates. Associate athletic director and sports information director John Douglas was impressed by Haagen’s ability to weave themes together, from international competition to Division III.

“Paul is uniquely qualified,” Douglas says, “as someone who was a Haverford athlete now in a lion’s den of big-time athletics. He’s seen it all, thought about it all, and at the deepest levels. He has studied collegiate athletics since the Civil War and understands how we got here. The big schools have demonstrated their bigness by competing at that level. The small schools want success without the ‘sins’ of our larger peers. Paul has thought about ‘pure athletics’ and we believe at Haverford we’re closer to that ideal than some of the big state universities. There are varying degrees to the exceptions institutions make in order to be successful. Some definition of purity would be based on a program that makes the fewest exceptions.

“At Haverford, Paul Haagen saw an all-male school, saw football winding down, and was part of the lacrosse program as it was starting. He saw some of the ebb and flow that we’ve come to associate with athletics at Haverford over the years. As close as he is to Duke, Paul seems to have no illusions that there are lots of commonalities with places like Haverford. We’re all under the NCAA umbrella but he lives and sees the differences between Division I and Division III. It’s the contrast of athletes with professional ambitions who are providing entertainment against Haverford’s notion of competition and participation as part of a student’s educational experience. It’s very integrated here and so separate and defined there. Paul perceives and articulates those differences as well as anyone.”

Haverford moves into a new athletic era with the groundbreaking for the new Douglas B. Gardner Athletic Center this spring. The Center is Phase I of the College’s planned two-phase athletic facilities project. How does the promise of a new facility translate to someone who graduated more than 30 years ago, a lacrosse player who used blocks of cement and a pipe for free weights?

“It’s actually very difficult to know how this facility will affect things,” Haagen says. “On one level, it certainly will bring Haverford up to the level of its peers. That's important for athletes, for coaches, and for recuiting athletes. But it will also provide facilities for non-athletes. That's an important connection. You're involving the community. When you move forward and tear down the Field House—where we used to choke on the dust—that's another positive move. It's a terrible building.

"On another level, you can talk about this and the profile of athletics changing around the world. At Haverford, thet track and the field program has been and continues to be a big deal. Greg Kannerstein is one of the most thoughtful people in this arena. In trying to understand sports as performance, how does it have experiential social values we associate with participation and integration without becoming taskmaster stuff that drives everything else out? A new facility, a better facility, will provide a more attractive atmosphere in which that can happen.

Home