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The salience of student perceptions impacting campus climate is well noted (Strange & Banning, 2001), with a division in perceptions across racial diversity (Chang, 2003), among other factors. Little research, however, has explored the extent to which racial diversity has interacted with intercollegiate athletics to impact campus climate. The current study used the Athletics and Campus Community scale (Clopton, 2008b) to explore perceptions of athletics and perceptual divisions between athletes and nonathletes by race. Results revealed a significant interaction between race and athlete status, where Black nonathlete students reported a greater perception of the impact of athletics than Black student-athletes. Conversely, White student-athletes perceived a more positive impact of athletics than White nonathletes.
The racial diversification of higher education is not a phenomenon that automatically regis- ters beneficial outcomes (Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002). While today's college experi- ence is more diverse than ever before, certain elements of higher education possess the potential to divide the campus community along these lines of diversity. One of those ele- ments is the presence of big-time intercolle- giate athletics, which has the potential to elicit negative responses from various constituents of the college community. In broad terms, big- time intercollegiate athletics are those pro- grams that engage in athletic competition at the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Divi- sion I-A) in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), through escalating expenditures in salaries, facilities, travel, and so on (Zimbalist, 2001).
These same programs are also often distin- guished by their sources of revenue, including television contracts and gate receipts, and upon the level of national exposure upon which the rely (Sperber, 2000). Notably, here, colleges and universities which compete in big-time college athletics experience a unique impact upon the overall culture of the institu- tion (Beyer & Hannah, 2000). In fact, the role of athletics in the institution and its subsequent impact on the student body is unique to these colleges and universities at this level (Beyer & Hannah, 2000; Toma, 1999, 2003). Further, big-time college athletics includes not only the escalation of performance standards among these institutions, but also those institutions engaged in a pursuit of isomorphism who aspire to this status (Cunningham & Ashley, 2001; Washington & Ventresca, 2004).
Big-time intercollegiate athletics have also been charged...