One of the most interesting lines in the report of the special UNC faculty panel that looked into academic fraud was in the section entitled: A Campus with Two Cultures.
"....some faculty are reportedly openly disapproving of having any student-athletes enroll in their courses."
The report doesn't elaborate on that sentence. But you can speculate where those "openly disapproving" faculty members are coming from, given what we have learned about cases of academic fraud involving, primarily, football players at UNC-CH. If, on the first day of class, a faculty members looks out at the students sitting in the room and sees a bunch of extremely large men squeezing into the seats, what is the professor to think?
a. Great. Somehow my class has gotten on the unofficial list of gut courses circulating in athletic circles. So much for my reputation.
b. Great. I give lots of homework and quizzes, and take off points for missing classes and late assigments. I don't know who put these guys in my class, but I'm going to be the guy who, halfway through the semester, will be in the dean's office explaining to some offensive line coach why his starters are failing.
I taught at Maryland in the journalism school, in the mid-'90s. My course was an introduction to news writing, and there were - as you might imagine - non-stop writing assignments. If you couldn't write clearly and quickly, or if you had spelling or grammar issues, you were toast in this class. Attendance was mandatory and there were constant quizzes. In four semesters of teaching nearly 150 students, I had exactly one athlete take the course - a member of the woman's lacrosse team. I knew this because instructors had to fill out progress reports for any athlete in a class and send the form to the athletic department.
Comments
Why should the professors...
Fri, 07/27/2012 - 11:38 — uBnicehave to deal with any student whose primary emphasis is not on academics, particularly when they are scholarship athletes at Div I schools? Big-time college sports are an entertainment business that has nothing to do with the education mission of the university. The athletic departments are quick to remind you that they generate their own money, have their own facilities, and are pretty much independent of the university. They should be moved off campus and treated as a private subsidiary of the university. They could be managed in the same way as UNC Hospitals and their private, wholly owned subsidiaries. And then they should pay the entertainers (players).
Div III college sports (no athletic scholarships) and, with few exceptions, Div II do not suffer from this problem. So academia and sports can co-exist. But we know the model: sports must be de-emphasized. The only way to de-emphasize at Div I schools is to move it off campus. Because of the money, it will not just disappear.
Yes, but. If you eliminate
Fri, 07/27/2012 - 13:29 — danbarkin (author)Yes, but. If you eliminate the construct that college players are students, then the whole thing collapses. A big part of the narrative that is college athletics is that the players on the field are just regular kids who go to class and eat in the cafeteria and study in the library and live in the dorms when they aren't throwing a football 60 yards downfield in a perfect spiral. That's why the universities call them student-athletes and not athlete-students. For the people in the stands and the audience watching on TV, this notion of amateurs playing their hearts out for the glory of State U. is a powerful draw. Once you move this out of the academic village, it loses its appeal.
Student-athlete...
Fri, 07/27/2012 - 14:25 — uBnicenomenclature was conjured up by the early head of the NCAA to avoid both paying the athlete and for not giving workman's compensation. The October 2011 Atlantic Monthly details the mechinations of the NCAA in detail. It is ugly.
We have experienced this before. It is called the Olympics.