DURHAM, N.C. - A new Knight Foundation report that found a majority of college presidents saying they feel powerless to contain the escalating costs of big-time college athletics "should come as no surprise," says a Duke University professor.

"The situation universities face today is very similar to the one that existed 80 years ago, when the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a report ‘American College Athletics,'" says Charles Clotfelter, who is writing a book about the role of big-time athletics in American universities.

That report found college athletics to be a "highly organized" and "profitable" commercial enterprise. He said three main facts explain the persistence of the problems outlined in this new report:

"One, big-time college athletics has become an integral function of many American universities, and because of its popularity, it holds tremendous commercial potential for advertisers, television networks and universities.

"Two, the key stakeholders in universities with big-time athletic programs not only want to continue intercollegiate competition, they want to have winning teams.

"Three, for a university to achieve this kind of athletic success, it is necessary to hire and retain a cadre of professionals whose training and experience make them very different from those who run the academic side of universities. Inside universities with big-time programs, there develops a symbiotic but uneasy partnership between these disparate enterprises."

Although the same basic conditions have existed since the Carnegie Foundation report in 1929, three things have changed that magnify the importance of the differences between these two enterprises, says Clotfelter, a professor of public policy, economics and law at Duke.

"One is the rise of television. Two is the 1984 Supreme Court decision that ended the NCAA's monopoly over TV broadcasts of college football games. Three is the escalation of pay for those at the top, including CEOs, college coaches and other celebrities. For a group of 45 public universities over the period 1986 to 2007, the average full professor's salary increased 30 percent, the average university president's pay doubled, and the average pay for the head football coach increased six-fold.

"Without some fairly strong policy changes from outside of higher education, reforms from within universities, especially those taken individually, are as unlikely to work in the coming decades as they have over the past 80 years."

An op-ed about college athletics by Clotfelter ran on Sunday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.