Faster, More Open NCAA Approach Urged : Enforcement: Panel acts amid political pressure for changes in the way penalties are handed out.

An NCAA panel on Monday recommended a series of changes in the organization’s enforcement procedure, including proposals that would speed the process and open it to greater public scrutiny.

A special committee, formed earlier this year at the request of NCAA Executive Director Dick Schultz, issued a report outlining 11 recommendations, including one to establish a “summary disposition” procedure, decreasing the amount of time required to process certain cases and featuring open hearings.

Under current policy, all cases involving major rules violations are heard by the NCAA Committee on Infractions, which conducts closed hearings.

Committee chairman Rex Lee, a former U.S. solicitor general who is president of Brigham Young University, said in a prepared statement that his committee found NCAA enforcement procedure to be “fundamentally fair and sound.”

The committee’s recommendations, he said, “represent structural and procedural changes designed to enhance the existing process.”

The 11-person committee includes four former judges, among them Warren Burger, a former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice. Benjamin Civiletti, a former U.S. attorney general, is also on the panel.

The committee’s recommendations come at a time when the NCAA’s enforcement procedure is a subject of political debate in several states, including California, as well as in Congress.

In the last two years, four states--Nevada, Nebraska, Illinois and Florida--have adopted legislation prohibiting the NCAA from imposing sanctions on schools in those states unless certain standards of legal due process are met.

Similar legislation was introduced last spring in both houses of the California Legislature, and a subcommittee of the California Senate Committee on Business and Professions is scheduled to hold a hearing on the issue Thursday.

“(The NCAA committee) did a very thorough review,” Schultz said. “(The panelists) speak highly of the programs in place, and they just think that these (changes) are things that will help improve the process and deal with some of the concerns, some of the perceptions, that are out there.

“I think a couple of the (recommendations) are very innovative. My only concern is they may be so innovative that they will be hard for the (NCAA) membership to accept.”

In attempting to address the length of NCAA investigations, a common concern of critics, the committee recommended the “summary disposition,” by which a school’s chief executive officer and the NCAA enforcement staff would negotiate a mutually acceptable set of findings and penalties in a case without going through the hearing process.

A case not resolved by such a disposition would, according to the committee’s report, be heard by a special hearing officer--a former judge or other legal authority--who would resolve factual issues and recommend penalties to the Committee on Infractions.

This change, the committee noted, would resolve the “widely held perception” of an inadequate separation between the enforcement staff and the Committee on Infractions, a six-member panel of administrators from NCAA schools.

In what might prove to be its most controversial recommendation, the committee also urged that the NCAA hold open infractions hearings “to the greatest extent possible.”

The NCAA does not have subpoena power to compel testimony, and the opinion has long been held by enforcement officials that staging open hearings would hamper the ability of investigators to obtain information.

Lee, speaking to reporters after a news conference in Washington, noted that the proposal calling for open hearings was the most contentious for the committee. But he said that open hearings “will be enlightening, refreshing, will enhance the quality of the process and increase public confidence.”