With all the attention that we have finally come to pay to Arthur Ashe as a pioneering professional athlete and humanitarian it is easy to forget that Ashe was first an incredible college student-athlete at the University of California Los Angeles in the 1960s.

There has surely been progress on the issue of race in the three decades since he left UCLA. However, I believe that no problem is greater today at our institutions of higher education than the racial issue. We are far from fulfilling Arthur Ashe's dream for college sport. In 1988 Ashe said, "When bright young minds can't afford college, America pays the price." He saw college sport as a vehicle to afford young people the opportunity to get an education while competing as student athletes. Moreover, he wanted those same young people to have the opportunity to coach and administer college sport after their playing careers ended.

There were twenty-four openings for a head coach in Division I after the 1996 college football season. Only one African American was hired--at New Mexico State. That came after the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for high school prospects to boycott colleges with poor records for hiring people of color. While college basketball has done better, hiring practices for the rest of college sport are scandalous. Fewer than 4 percent of all college head coaches are African American. Fewer than 5 percent of all athletic directors, their assistants and associate directors are African American. If you are Hispanic, Asian or Native American, you are not even on the radar screen for those positions.

The potential of African American student athletes to graduate is seriously compromised by the fact that so few staff, faculty and other students on campus look like them. They have to feel less welcome than white students on our campuses.

Many expect African American student athletes who play basketball and football to do poorly academically. If they meet such expectations for failure, many assume they were dreaming about the NBA and NFL. But a poor academic experience is hardly limited to those sports.

Every year, a list of the fifty schools with the worst graduation rates for African American male and female athletes in track and field is published by Emerge magazine. The results of the forthcoming study, due out in June, are frightening. To dodge the list for men's track, a college merely had to have a graduation rate of 21 percent. Forty-two of the fifty schools did not have a single African American male athlete graduate through four entering classes.

Nineteen of the fifty schools on the list for women's track did not graduate even one African American female athlete over four successive recruiting years. To elude the study's list in basketball, a college merely had to have a graduation rate of 18 percent. Twenty-three of the fifty schools did not graduate a single African American athlete though four straight classes!

The greatest tragedy, of course, is that these numbers reflect other racial issues on our campuses. The percentage of African American faculty is stagnating and remains lower than the percentage of head coaches; the proportion of African American administrators is below that of athletic directors and their assistants.

As bad as the graduation rates for male and female African American student athletes are, they exceed the graduation rate for both male and female African American students in general.

Most of American's campuses remain enclaves that preserve white privilege. The vast majority of students, faculty and administrators on our campuses are white; other than the rare Martin Luther King center or boulevards, nearly all buildings and streets are named after white people.

These facts sadly demonstrate the force of racial problems at American colleges and show the profound difficulty for African Americans and other minorities to secure the assurances that were made to them. Sport continues to open our eyes to other necessary lessons in life. What will sport get as a grade in the report card of life? Arthur Ashe overcame all of these factors and more to excel in all aspects of his life. In 1991, he told a Sports Illustrated writer that "Racism can't be overcome. It will be there for the rest of your life. You have to figure out how to deal with it. Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can."

Someday Arthur Ashe's daughter, Camera, will go to college. Will we as a society have removed those obstacles so Camera and her classmates will have equal opportunity to achieve all of their dreams? Or will they have to figure out "how to deal with it?"

Camera's father's hope for America cannot be achieved until we acknowledge the intensity of our racial dilemma both in and out of sport. Will we be able to celebrate Arthur's dream? Camera--all of our children--cannot afford for us to delay a frontal assault on racism. It is their futures that we must all work to ensure and protect.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates