The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, often referred to simply as the Knight Commission, is an independent leadership group of academic, athletic, and sports leaders with an eye toward leading reforms whose purpose is to develop, promote, and lead transformational change that prioritizes the education, health, safety, and success of college athletes.
The Commission is positioned as a trusted resource for leaders and decision-makers in college sports, including university and industry leaders and most recently, U.S. Congress.
The Commission was founded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which was itself founded by brothers John S. Knight and James L. Knight, members of the founding family of what became the Knight Ridder newspaper and broadcasting chain. The Commission first met in 1989 after a series of scandals in college sports. The founding co-chairmen of the Commission were Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, and William C. Friday, former president of the University of North Carolina system.
As an independent group, the Knight Commission has no official connection to governing bodies such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the primary sanctioning body for college sports in the United States, or any government agencies. But because of its blue ribbon panel and high profile within the news media, the Commission's work carries considerable influence within college sports as a whole.
Since its inception, the NCAA has adopted a number of Commission recommendations, particularly those that strengthened academic standards. Some of the key areas of impact include:
The Knight Commission’s current work is focused on a number of key priorities and initiatives, including federal legislation education efforts and the C.A.R.E. Model framework.
Beginning in 2025, several Congressional bills were introduced to impact college sports. The Commission produced several resources and hosted national meetings to inform all stakeholders about the proposed bills and their impact on college sports.
In September 2021, the Commission released a major proposal to more closely connect the distribution and spending of shared athletics revenues with the broad educational mission of college athletics programs. The Connecting Athletics Revenues with the Educational Model of College Sports (C.A.R.E.) Model report recommended altering both the distribution criteria and uses of funds for more than $3.5 billion distributed annually by the NCAA, CFP, and Division I conferences. This C.A.R.E. Model is the newest set of recommendations in the Knight Commission’s “Transforming the D-I Model” series.
The Commission’s proposed requirements could be imposed either by Congress or the respective college sports governing bodies. The C.A.R.E. Model requires that four core principles guide both the distribution criteria and accountability for how shared athletics revenues are spent.
Those core principles are:
In 2024, the Commission began to offer C.A.R.E. Model Conference grants of up to $25,000 for Division I conferences that exemplify C.A.R.E. Model principles. Five conferences have been awarded grants and named C.A.R.E. Champions for 2026-2027- America East Conference (2025 and 2026), the Metro Conference (2024, 2025 and 2026), the Patriot League (2025 and 2026), The Southern Conference (2024, 2025 and 2026), and The Summit League (2025 and 2026). The Big Sky Conference was a repeat C.A.R.E. Champion for 2024 and 2025.
In 2025 the Knight Commission and Elon University Poll conducted both a national public opinion poll and a national survey of NCAA Division I university presidents, athletics directors and other campus athletics leaders.
The public opinion poll showed that the American public is divided on athlete compensation and employment, and the governance of college sports, but are unified in support of academic standards and the importance of college athletics opportunities in all sports. The Division I leaders survey revealed deep concerns over direction of Division I sports, financial stability and the impact of the House v. NCAA settlement, but also highlighted nearly unanimous support for maintaining academic mission and standards.
Results, particularly from the Division I leaders survey, continue to inform key priorities for the Commission, particularly around educating stakeholders, including congress, regarding current and recommended frameworks and reforms for college sports.
In late 2019, the Commission announced a comprehensive examination of new models to restructure college sports, citing the challenges created by the “highly commercialized environment” for Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football and some NCAA Division I sports, particularly men’s basketball. This resulted in several recommendations, a series of public forums, and a culminating report in 2020, Transforming the NCAA D-I Model.
The transformational recommendations included:
This was a major study and series of reports examining the overall NCAA Division I model, focusing especially on the impact of NCAA FBS football on D-I sports as a whole.
The Commission has also led several initiatives to provide greater financial transparency for college sports:
The Commission issued its groundbreaking report, Keeping Faith with the Student Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics in 1991. In the report, the Knight Commission proposed a major overhaul in the way colleges run their athletic departments, proposing what it called the “one-plus-three” model — in which the “one,” control by the college president, is directed toward the “three” goals of academic integrity, financial integrity and independent certification. The report was influential in the implementation of many reforms by the NCAA, including a major restructuring within the NCAA itself, when in 1996 the governance of the association was taken away from college athletic directors and put into the hands of college presidents.
In 2001, the Commission issued its second major report, A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education, which reiterated almost all of the original report's recommendations.
One notable recommendation was that the NCAA restrict participation in postseason to teams whose graduation rate is 50 percent or greater, a concept that influenced the development of NCAA academic policies and, ultimately, its 2011 adoption of an academic threshold for postseason competition.
The Knight Commission’s third report Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values, and the Future of College Sports was released in 2010. It calls for strengthening accountability through transparency, rewarding practices that make academics a priority, and treating athletes as students first.
The report also recommended that a portion of the NCAA financial incentives reward academic outcomes. The NCAA adopted changes to its revenue distribution formula in 2016 to reward academic outcomes.
"Transforming the NCAA D-I Model" was an examination of the overall NCAA Division I model, focusing especially on the impact of NCAA FBS football on D-I sports as a whole.
In May 2021, the Commission released its Achieving Racial Equity in College Sports Report. The report highlights opportunities and steps to move toward fulfilling the goal of equitable treatment, and places special emphasis on moving from pledge to policy and advocacy to action.
One of the recommendations calls on the NCAA to eliminate the use of standardized test scores for initial athletics eligibility requirements in NCAA Divisions I and II, a recommendation that was advanced within the NCAA legislative process.
As of 2024, the Commission's co-chairs are Pamela Bernard, former vice president and general counsel, Duke University, and Len Elmore, senior lecturer at Columbia University, attorney, former ESPN analyst and former standout basketball player for the University of Maryland, the NBA and the ABA. The Commission's CEO is Amy Privette Perko, who is a member of the Wake Forest University Sports Hall of Fame and previously worked in college sports at the University of Kansas and at the NCAA.
Members (alphabetical by last name):
Member, ex-officio
Past co-chairs:
Founding co-chairs