September 16, 2009
NCAA President Brand Dies at 67
CHN Staff Report
NCAA president Myles Brand, who first gained national notoriety by firing legendary basketball coach Bob Knight while president of Indiana University, died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer. He was 67.
No successor has been named, and no timetable has been set to name one.
Brand was the first former university president to be put in charge of the NCAA, being named in October 2002, two years after firing Knight.
Brand came to the NCAA determined to return the focus, at least in part, back to the classroom. He pushed for tougher eligibility standards for athletes, overseeing the effort for two new academic measures — the Academic Progress Report and the Graduation Success Rate. The statistics, which track how student athletes are progressing towards graduation, can lead to sanctions against athletic programs.
“This was a man who understood the importance of higher education, as well as the benefit of athletics participation as part of the educational experience,” NCAA executive vice president Bernard Franklin said in a statement. “He did not waver from that as a tenet of NCAA operations.”
Before Indiana, Brand was president at the University of Oregon for five years. He also held posts at Ohio State, the University of Arizona and Illinois-Chicago after starting his career as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Brand graduated from Rensselaer in 1964, and received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rochester in 1967.
