Interesting piece from ESPN.com Page 2 columnist and current Sirius sports talk host Bomani Jones on student athletes and academics.
If you’re looking beneath the surface for the problem in Chapel Hill, you might find it in the amazing coincidence that so many top-notch athletes are so interested in how humans relay messages. Or maybe it’s just that “communications” fits the bill for what a former UNC football player told me about the majors of choice there: Athletes are interested in a major that works around their busy schedules, requires little math, primarily assigns short papers and uses subjective grading in most of its courses.
That common thread among so many of UNC’s best players reflects a problem particular to athletics. It isn’t limited to Chapel Hill; nor is it merely an indication of how education has been devalued across the board. Only in athletics are students asked to manage their schoolwork around their real jobs. It’s the only department on campus where limiting the scope of one’s educational possibilities is passed off as a favor. It essentially designates a teenager to be academically irredeemable.
As long as education is used as currency for athletes’ bodies and ungodly amounts of their time, they must at least learn something. Otherwise, they’re being “paid” with rubber checks.
They receive clothes, lodging and the chance to work, a bushel of goods that makes comparisons between college sports and human trafficking unavoidable. Without an enriching educational environment, the current system of college athletics is worse than unfair. It’s inhumane.
That is why the resolution of these allegations of academic impropriety is so much more important than the sprawling probe of agents that began after NCAA officials noticed UNC’s Marvin Austin tweeting about enjoying some benefits that college football players might not be allowed. That investigation centers around external forces that are oppositional to the NCAA, enemies the NCAA will always face as long as schools are so concerned with growing revenues. It’s the NCAA protecting its virtue from those that wish it harm.
The academic allegations don’t come with a bogeyman like agents. They are about a school against itself — its lucrative and visible side business versus its primary objective, two things that each day seem to have less to do with one another. More importantly, it’s a public battle between reality and the rhetoric that makes the current system at all defensible: that education is a priceless, uplifting asset that student-athletes will have forever.
Asking head coach Butch Davis and athletics director Dick Baddour to answer for one tutor isn’t enough. What UNC needs to ask itself is whether the millions it invests in academic support is about teaching student-athletes or keeping them eligible and making them viable contributors to the school’s Academic Progress Rate.
(Emphasis mine)
Be sure to read the whole thing. I think Jones is mostly right here in that academic support is centered more on keeping players eligible than it is giving them a good education. Earlier this week I alluded to my days as an athlete at UNC Greensboro and how athletes were asked to attend study hall if their GPA fell to close to the eligibility line. The implication was no one cares if your GPA was hovering just above the NCAA prescribed Mendoza line of 1-8-2.0 but if you strayed into an area where your eligibility was threatened then action was taken. For all anyone knew or cared you could be taking the easiest classes on campus and working towards some worthless degree. As long as you pulled a 2.01 the athletic department really did concern itself with you.
Jones’ basic point is no one cares about the quality of education received by athletes only that they hit whatever milestones the NCAA sets forth for continuing eligibility. The question is how do you raise that quality and balance their time with the commitment to being a Division I student athlete? As a cross country runner it was easier. We generally had one daily practice that consumed 2-3 hours from around 3-6 PM. There were 6-8 meets during the season, all on Saturday which meant only missing afternoon classes on Friday. For football and basketball players in particular the sport is much more time consuming. There is practice, working out in the weight room, film sessions, treatment for injuries, etc, etc, etc. While the NCAA limits practice time there is no limit on what the athlete might opt to do on his own. Given the time spent on athletic endeavors it is easy to see how athletes might gravitate towards school work that fits around the object of their primary focus.
In that regard, I do wonder if you can make a comparison to regular students who spend as much time honing a talent such as playing the violin as football players do on the practice field. However in those cases, students are expected to maintain their skill and attend other classes all without the academic support structure athletes have behind them. I have heard the argument made that athletes should be able to avail themselves of a major course of study which is connected to their sport. However that is really no different than what is happening now since you are implying that athletes cannot do “real” academic work so they are going to shunt them into a “special” major just for jocks.
In other words, there are no easy answers, especially with an entrenched culture that has revenue as the ultimate end. Keeping players on the north side of eligibility is simply a means to that end. Not to mention, you can lead a horse to water but your cannot make it drink. In some cases, players simply do not care to do the work. Jones cites a lack of time as the reason a player might lean on a tutor to get a paper done. I think you cannot discount apathy as a contributing factor or the notion that going to class is unnecessary beyond it being a means to staying eligible so they can showcase their talents and get drafted professionally. In other cases, some athletes are just like students in the general population. They would rather watch TV, go to a movie, hang out with friends or any number of activities college students do in their free time. If I had a dollar for every minute I put off doing a paper or studying for a test, I’d probably be rich. Yet, I was 18-22 years old, on my own for the first time and enjoying the college life. There was a level of academic survival I was willing to accept and my academic focus reflected that.
Some people go to college and invest time in academics because that is their passion. Maybe they like school. Maybe they have a tremendous work ethic. Maybe it comes easy to them. There are those of us who are perfectly fine with a GPA at or slightly below 3.0 so we spent less time on our school work than we would if we wanted to be summa cum laude. There are still others who have not an ounce of concern for their academics. Student athletes as a whole have people from each of these categories. When you add the trappings on being a star athlete on a ranked athletic team, I imagine it can have a deleterious effect on their focus. When you add the prospect of making millions of dollars professionally, the appetite for academic work might drop even more. In the end I agree with Jones that an effort should be made the raise the quality of education being received by athletes. I also realize that all you can do is put the opportunity before them and encourage them to take it. Some of them will, some of them will resist. All any administration can do is try. The question is UNC or anyone else actually trying?
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Sirius 98. Not XM. If you go to XM 98, you’d be in for a surprise.
And apparently I am too freaking lazy to LOOK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ARTICLE for that info. That is the kind of effort that marked my academic career.
By and large, I agree with Bomani’s points. However another point that should be kept in mind is the age old friction about what is more important when you are in college – getting a well rounded education or getting career training? It is not uncommon for people to emphasize the latter (which is why lots of people major in subjects that are more marketable then the subject they find the most interesting and would like to learn the most about).
If you believe that career training is more important then getting a well rounded education, then what should someone whose career aspiration is to play professional sports spend more time on while they are in college? Studying or practicing? And how should the University manage these competing objectives?
Long time lurker, first time commenter; first time I felt I had something to offer. I have a PhD in Higher Ed Administration so I am quite passionate about the value of education. That said, I was an RA at UNC for the FB team and tutored athletes at UNC, UGA, and Mississippi State. I am frankly amazed that any of them graduate. I would get State players at 8:00 PM and no matter what we were doing, they could fall asleep they are so tired. Bill Dooley was the coach when I was at UNC and he wore their young butts out.
My cousin, RIP, was a starter on that UNC team and I watched what he went through. I read and hear folks talk about a free education. NOTHING could be further from the truth; they earn it.
I missed the cheating part, but at some of the schools, I know the players were used and classes were just a way to keep folks elegible.
Just my 2 cents.
For whatever reason of history, American society has a strong emotional connection between schools and sports. This does not seem to exist as much in Europe, where sports passions are tied to club teams that represent cities and towns. If European kids are good at a sport, they go play for the local club team, not for their high school or college team like we do. Maybe this is a better way to do things if you want to avoid the hypocricy of “student-athletes”. In my opinion the American combination of education and athletics inevitably causes hypocricy, because the societal purpose of education and the societal purpose of elite athletics are in conflict. The fact is that brains and brawn have few common interests. So we can continue to wring our hands over the state of this, or we can accept the reality that UNC’s athletes (and every other elite school’s athletes) are really more gladiators than students. Their societal purpose is to be mascots that provide fans with an outlet to express emotions about a university that we share a deep attachment to. And that is a valuable thing. But lets not pretend that they are really students.
I love college athletics, but its become one of those situations where everyone feigns naivete and says “we can square this circle if we try hard enough!” Its blindness to reality.
How is that any different from the kids who knew they were going to law school who took gut courses all the way through to maintain a high GPA, knowing that law schools pay little or no attention to major or courses taken?
Any kid who wants to go to a decent graduate school takes difficult college courses out of his or her field at a huge risk. And if they want to get into to law school, the easiest major possible, from the easiest school extant is the way to go.
The end goal of a college education is still to get a decent job. Its time to separate an athletic course of study from an acedemic one. Treat the atletic college just like the acedemic side: Let the AD recruit the athletes; hire the coaches to coach their respective sports, and fill in the time with usefull classes that will benefit the athletes in a sports related career. If they wash out as a pro athlete, they would at leat have something to fall back on.
^^William, you make a good point, but I think the difference is that NONE of the classes that an aspiring football player takes pertain to his chosen career.
BTW – I happen to believe Universities create unnecessary financial hardships for students by taking what could have been a 2 year degree track and stretching it out to four years by adding the requirement to take a bunch of classes that are unrelated to a student’s major. The Universities may be doing so with a lofty goal in mind (broadening the students scope of knowledge) but not everyone can afford that goal.
Ah, intelligent discourse and social commentary. I’ll take THF blog over other lunatic bulletin boards any day.
I remember one of my frat brothers (and I believed him at the time) telling me how all the companies would be fighting over him because of his 3 different liberal arts majors. Yeah, that is what happened, because we all know that in non-technical and non-academic fields, you use so much of your major at work.
The irony here (at least to me) is that this is happening at a University that has a very solid history of bending over backwards to accommodate Minority Education. To a fault some might even say. No doubt in some of these Faculty minds, it’s a positive that many of these same athletes are exposed to College life, when were it not for athletics, even they wouldn’t get a sniff of UNC. Having said that, I can’t imagine it sits well with same when the “opportunity” becomes a farce.
I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I want to be blunt.
If you want to go to a trade school, go to a trade school. Carolina is something different and IMO better.
Are Harvard, Stanford and Princeton trade schools? Do we want to be more like them or more like Strayer Academy?
I love the sports at Carolina and live and die with them now that I’m an alumnus. But my parents did not send me there so that I could earn top dollar on graduating. They sent me there to find out what was in the world, what had gone before, and what could lie ahead. Not once in my student career did they pressure me, nor did I feel pressure from any other source, to make myself “marketable.”
Let the present generation live as I and so many others were able to do. Go to college to open your eyes to the zillions of things out there. Making a living is for later, and will take care of itself.
UNC just announced that Marvin Austin has been suspended indefinitely.
Ouch.
Crap is what I said to that william. And I said it very loud too, I scared one of my roommates.
100% agree, Rath. If you learn how to “think” first, learning how to “do” becomes far simpler. Evidence of this is the fact that the schools you list are also some of the top producers of technical talent, despite being “Liberal Arts” schools.
Marvin was the first shoe to drop. I hear the sounds of many more feet on the horizon and not one is the pitter-patter of little ones! “Crap” is indeed an operative word to describe this entire fiasco.
And I had been trying so hard all summer not to say things like “when does basketball season start….”
Face it, this happens everywhere. I hate to say it, but I think we would be shocked at some of the big names at UNC that were potentially sheltered just to stay eligible and ensure success on the field or the court. I saw it happen at a division II school I attended here in Omaha, and I’m sure it happens at every division III school and junior college. Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life. A lot of these kids were entitled back in high school, so why would college be any different?
We would all like to see every college kid go to class and graduate with honors and have a degree to fall back on if they don’t make it to the NBA/NFL/MLB, but that’s not the case. Money is too big and important to these schools where they’ll do anything possible to get their hands on the paycheck. And since the bowl money, TV contracts, and merchandising won’t go away, this is always going to happen.
As a long-time small-college educator, I would suggest that the problem with athletes’ poor performance in the classroom begins LONG before they reach college. (God forbid we should raise the bar for academics — that’s not fair!) I don’t deal with athletes in my classes, but I do deal with the woefully unprepared and the unmotivated, and my conclusion is that the enemy, as Pogo has observed, “is us”. My NC community is probably not much different than most; simply stated, minimal cultural value is attached to education. Much lip service is paid to improving education, and much money is expended on fad fixes and classroom technology, but the root of the problem is environments (families, society) that inspire a bare tolerance for learning at best. Add the way in which athletes are coddled from an early age and it’s no wonder college sports are headed for the abyss.
In the case of NCAA hoops the abyss will involve players finding alternative ways to hone their craft for the “next level” — overseas, quality minor leagues, or a lawsuit that ends the one-and done-rule. (The “kids” may not be college-ready, but they ain’t stupid.) At some point they’re all going to decide to quit playing for a bunch of old farts who try to ban Tweeting.
DatH
DatH –
As a Certified Old Fart, I say that college is for people who want a college education. If a kid isn’t interested in that, fine, it’s a free country, but let him go somewhere else (overseas, as you mention, is fine).
I agree with you and Andy In Omaha that a corrupted and dumbed-down culture is at the root of the problem. The answer is not to go along with it on the theory that everybody else is doing it. The answer is to turn your back on it. The TireQuest Microdot Bowl and all the agents and agents for agents can bag their big money and take a hike.
Ridiculing standards as the plague of old farts is the ancient trick of the standardless. They sound so with-it and worldly wise. But we’ve seen enough of where they would lead us. There is a better way to treat our childern, which is who these college kids still are — better for them and more honorable for us.
College is first an foremost for educating. Dean Smith didn’t cheat and didn’t put up with cheaters. What he did with cheaters was beat them with better, and clean, teams. We need to remember now what Smith never forgot.
And let’s not forget, that most people are better off with at least some exposure to college, regardless. So what are we upset about? I have heard that back in the olden days, UVa had to take every single Virginia high school graduate who applied, which in some ways seems much more fair.
I love UNC, but basically it provided a dirt cheap but top-notch education for people,who for the most part, could have afforded to pay much more. Except for room, food and books, UNC was essentially free during the 1980′s. Is that the right way to go, or is wealth being redistributed from poorer people in North Carolina to pay for the educations of upper middle class people. I don’t live in North Carolina anymore, but your sales tax is reaching shocking proportions. I don’t know where all the money goes, but as much as I love UNC, and I understand its history as the best public university in the South, I am not sure that is serving the people of its state as well as the University of Maryland at College Park does, which is more expensive, but makes a real attempt, and succeeds, at enrolling a far, far greater percentage of low-income and minority students.
When the Knight Commission issued their report one issue they focused on was how much and how schools spent huge sums of money of the educational support system for revenue generating athletes. The problem is pretty simple everybody at the school is highly vested in keeping the kid eligible not educating them. That is why somebody’s job is to force a major down a kids throat, pick all his classes and instructors (always friendly ones). For the average student there may be a list of easy classes and Professors (not a list for an entire major) that is passed among friends but the Athletic Department pays somebody to track that stuff. See a small conflict there? Funny how what a school is famous for academically is never highlighted by the majors of the Football and Basketball players.
It is an interesting dynamic. When I was there, Portuguese had a large number of football players taking the language, which seemed to serve both the department and the football team, if you catch my drift. One hand washes the other. I took Portuguese, so I benefited.