There are many places where you’d like your college president to show up. When a faculty group has concerns with the administration. Be there. When student activists have complaints. Listen. When alumni come calling with nostalgia and/or money. Shake some hands. When other community leaders need advice. Offer it. But sports locker rooms? Nope. College presidents don’t have to go there.

Elson Floyd is in his first year as Washington State University’s president. In a recent interview with Spokesman-Review sports reporter Nick Eaton, Floyd defended his decision not to visit team locker rooms – or travel to most out-of-town games – with WSU sports teams. His predecessor, V. Lane Rawlins, did both.

“There are some spaces that are sacrosanct, and I think that the locker room is one of those spaces,” Floyd explained. The coach needs to be there building esprit de corps, but not the president of the university, he said. Good call.

Floyd also spoke in favor of balance at WSU. He hopes to build programs that allow athletes to play on teams that are competitive at a national level, while remaining competitive in their classes.

Sports can take over a university and put pressure on leaders to compromise classroom standards and behavioral ethics for athletes and coaches. WSU’s Floyd and the Rev. Robert Spitzer, president of Gonzaga University, are in the enviable position of leading Inland Northwest institutions garnering national attention.

The Zags “cinderella-ed” their way into the NCAA tournament in 1999. They’ve stayed good for so long that people throughout the country cringe when sports reporters mispronounce Gonzaga. In the old days, only locals knew or cared.

And the men’s basketball team, ranked No. 4, is enjoying its highest rating in school history. The nation’s college sports fans know about Pullman’s Cougs now, too.

The attention, and the money, can get heady. If “you become what you pay for,” then colleges sometimes appear to value coaches over professors, physical prowess on the basketball court and football field over intellectual prowess in the classroom. Idaho Gov. Butch Otter makes nearly seven times less than Boise State University’s head football coach, Chris Petersen.

Money following sports isn’t all bad for a university. The better the sports team, the greater the national exposure. The greater the exposure, the easier it is to recruit good students and quality faculty and staff.

The challenge for the leaders of winning-team universities is to keep the perspective on what ultimately matters for most students. Sports teams win and lose, rise and fall. Give sports too much power, too much clout, too much praise, and the academic programs that educate our future citizens and leaders are the losers out every time.