Williams College, one of the best, most selective schools in America, fills most of its 75-man football roster with students who do not meet regular admission standards.

"We call them the dopes. We do it in a kidding way, though," said football coach Dick Farley.

He has been at Williams for 32 years, long enough to know that "a dope" on his football team just might be brilliant.

"If most kids are getting in here with college board scores of 1,500, we might be dipping to 1,300 for football players," Farley said. "But those tests are just one indicator of how well somebody will do. I'm a blue-collar guy who never could have gotten into Williams, but I work hard enough that I sure as hell could have gotten out of Williams."

Virtually all of Farley's players do the same, graduating in four years after completing some of the most demanding course work in America.

Even with those successes, Williams and other elite academic schools are feeling heat this fall because of a new study and book that says they are embracing athletes who lag behind the rest of the student body.

The book, "Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values," was written by former Princeton University President William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin, daughter of Yale's current president.

Bowen and Levin say that even Ivy League schools and excellent liberal arts colleges such as Williams have allowed a "jockocracy" to take hold, by which athletes are separated academically, socially and culturally from the rest of the campus.

"Recruited athletes earn far lower grades than both their fellow athletes who were walk-ons and other students," Bowen and Levin wrote after tracking almost 28,000 students who entered 33 selective colleges and universities in 1995.

Carnegie Mellon University was among a handful of schools noted as an exception in Bowen's study.

At CMU, athletes typically perform better in school than the student body at-large, at least if grade-point averages are the measuring stick.

Women athletes at CMU had a 3.34 grade average last year, a tenth of a point higher than women who do not play intercollegiate sports.

Men on CMU's varsity teams had a 3.24 grade average, compared to 3.16 for all male students.

More impressive, they're making the grades in difficult and demanding courses. Thirty-eight percent of CMU's varsity athletes are engineering majors. Many of the rest are studying hard sciences and computer technology.

CMU athletes blend into the undergraduate campus population of 5,100 without difficulty, mostly because their teams are almost anonymous.

"I mentioned basketball to a friend and she said, 'Do we even have a team?' " said Rebecca Shore, a sophomore center from State College who is majoring in information systems, a branch of computer technology.

Shore and her teammates play in the far-flung University Athletic Association, a Division III conference with schools in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and St. Louis.

Because away games can interfere with her academic schedule, Shore has had to take a couple of tests in noisy hotel rooms with a coach serving as proctor. She found it hard to do her best under those conditions, but said basketball usually forces her to be a better, more disciplined student.

"I don't procrastinate much, and I try to schedule my time very well," she said.

Bowen contends in his book that athletes at Ivy League and New England Small College Athletic Conference schools such as Williams are not nearly as inspired in their class work.

At the Ivy League universities, he found that 81 percent of recruited "high-profile athletes" -- men playing football, basketball and hockey -- ranked in the bottom third of their class. Forty-five percent of recruited female athletes also were in the lower tier academically.

He said a similar trend existed in the New England schools, such as Williams, Amherst, Trinity and Tufts.

Farley, the football coach at Williams, said Bowen was correct when he said intercollegiate sports had become overly important on campuses renowned for their academics.

Until a decade ago Williams, in Williamstown, Mass., did not bother to compete in NCAA tournaments. Now 30 of its 31 sports teams strive for the national playoffs. Last year Williams won Division III national championships in men's basketball and women's cross-country, and had four other teams finish in the top three in America.

Only its football team does not compete for the national playoffs, satisfying itself with an eight-game season that climaxes with a showdown against archrival Amherst.

The football program, Farley said, does not aspire to the playoffs because that could add a month to the season and interfere with final exams.

Though football seems to be kept in perspective, most of the players are admitted to Williams as exceptions to normal admission standards. The school lets in 14 football players each year who fall below regular requirements.

Overall, Williams grants admission exceptions to up to 66 athletes a year, down from 80 when Bowen's study was done.

Farley, whose record as head football coach is 109-18-3, said he could not field a decent team without those special accommodations.

"Legacies [children of alumni] and minority students get in on exceptions, too, but nobody's doing studies or writing books about them," he said.

Overall, Williams admits 520 freshmen each year from a pool of about 4,500 applicants. Competition is fierce. Each year, waves of students who have never made anything less than an A are rejected.

"We turn down dozens with double 800s -- perfect college boards," said Morton Schapiro, the Williams president.

Like all top-flight colleges, Schapiro said, Williams opens its doors to a wide range of society -- prodigious musicians, gifted writers, bright kids from shattered homes and excellent students who also have athletic talent.

"We look for students with very good records who are going to contribute to life here," Schapiro said. "But why make more of a concession for an athlete than for a great violinist? We don't. We're rededicating ourselves to making no greater tradeoffs for athletics than for anything else."

As for Bowen's contention that athletes do not fit in with the rest of the campus population, Williams' students say he simply is wrong.

Khari Stephenson, a senior midfielder on the men's soccer team, grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. He came to the United States in 1998, and applied to Williams after friends recommended the school.

"I haven't seen any separations at all. I'd say all the athletes are integrated with the rest of the students," said Stephenson, who made first-team all-American this year while achieving a 3.2 grade average in economics.

Admission standards at Williams are higher than ever, and the number of exceptions for athletes has been reduced. Schapiro said that formula shows that the college is serious about remaining a place for the best and the brightest.

Another elite school, Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Delaware County, decided it could not continue to have high academic standards and still field a respectable football team. So it dropped football.

"Over the years, the pressure to have excellent athletic teams has been so intense that some colleges have made greater concessions for athletics than in other areas," said Swarthmore President Al Bloom. "We were very careful not to do that."

Bloom said Swarthmore could have had a winning football program had it been willing to compromise standards to attract enough good players. Instead, a campus committee thought it best to do away with football altogether.

The decision, made in 2000, came after Bowen's study was compiled. Bloom said Swarthmore recognized the same problem that Bowen found in his research. Namely, Swarthmore would have had to lower its admission requirements to supply enough football talent to the coaching staff.

"Having a decent team would have thrown the whole equation out of balance," Bloom said.

Getting into Swarthmore is an accomplishment in itself. Each year, about 4,000 people apply for 375 spots in the freshman class.

Sometimes, being an exceptional student is not enough to survive the cut. "Over the years we actually have turned down about half the people with perfect board scores," Bloom said.

So a student with a gift for playing a horn or throwing a ball may stand out from the pack. Even with its football team disbanded, Swarthmore recruits about 15 percent of a class for athletics.

Matthew Goldstein, a Swarthmore senior from Hillsborough, Calif., says there's not a dumb jock in the bunch.

Goldstein studies honors biology while pitching for the baseball team. His goal is medical school, and he draws inspiration from his teammates.

"Athletes at Swarthmore have passion and interest in a lot of different areas," he said. "Guys who are good baseball players may also have an incredible talent in art or modern dance. Or they may have done volunteer work in South America."

With football no longer a part of campus life, Bloom says, neither athletes, legacy students nor anybody else coming to Swarthmore will drag down the college.

"We don't take anybody who isn't excellent," he said.