Tapsearch Com Editor- Student Athletes - a moral issue ?
May 14th 2011 18:17
The Chronicle of Higher Education on-line
The National Collegiate Athletic Assocation and the Athletes It Fails
The NCAA and the Athletes It Fails
By Thomas G. Palaima - Regular Contributor -
A Tapsearch Top Pick Article
How we treat the young people on our campuses whom we often
euphemistically call "student athletes" is essentially a moral issue.
Some of those students, after all, generate millions of dollars for
their coaches, athletic directors, and institutions, yet we have
failed, in turn, to make sure they have legitimate experiences as
students.
That is one of the concerns of the Coalition on Intercollegiate
Athletics, on which I have served as the representative of the
University of Texas at Austin for the last three years. So I welcomed
the open and honest look at the NCAA's role in big-time college
sports by Gerald S. Gurney that recently appeared in The Chronicle.
What would it entail to do better by those top athletes?
* They need to be placed at educational institutions suited to
their academic preparation and be provided with the tools to play the
most important game of their college careers: the competition with
true peers in the classroom.
* They need to have time to study and to explore elective courses
so as to choose a major and develop secondary interests that will
serve them well the rest of their lives. And they need to do this,
just like regular students, on their own initiative.
* They need to get their degrees before their aid runs out.
* Most of them need to be disabused of the dream that they will "go pro."
As the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association,
Mark A. Emmert, told coalition members at a meeting in Chicago in
January, only a tiny fraction of NCAA student athletes will have
careers as professional athletes. There are about 400,000 student
athletes nationwide, and 99.5 percent of them will spend their lives
doing something other than playing professional sports. Right now
there are grave problems in all four of those areas.
Gurney, who is president of the National Association of Academic
Advisors for Athletics, rightly describes the NCAA's two measures of
how well college athletes are doing in the classroom-the Academic
Progress Rate and the Graduation Success Rate-as "manufactured."
The Academic Progress Rate, or APR, is designed so that students can
be fully compliant even if they complete only 80 percent of the
courses needed for a degree after four years. Moreover, year-to-year
eligibility requirements are lax to the point of being farcical.
Consider U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's complaint about
the poor academic performances, especially in regard to athletes who
belong to minority groups, by many teams in the NCAA March Madness
basketball tournament. If the players are performing so poorly
academically, how can they be eligible for the tournaments? As Duncan
wrote last month in an opinion piece for The Washington Post, "Last
year, out of more than 6,000 NCAA intercollegiate sports teams, one
squad in men's basketball was banned from postseason play because of
a poor academic record."
There are three reasons so many poor academic performers squeaked
through to be eligible to play.
First, the APR makes it possible for students to maintain eligibility
for a season or two with academic-achievement levels that do not
prepare them to finish their degrees. For example, they may complete
as few as two courses in a semester, maintaining average GPA's of 1.8
at the end of their freshman year, 1.9 at the end of their sophomore
year, and 2.0 at the end of three years. In this age of grade
inflation, when the average GPA of all undergraduate students in all
courses at the University of Texas at Austin, for instance, is 3.09,
the sports GPA targets are hardly achievements.
Second, colleges are not penalized for substandard APR performances.
An APR of 925 works out to a 50 percent six-year graduation-success
rate, but according to the results of a study by the NCAA's Committee
on Academic Performance released last fall, 72 of 327 Division I
basketball teams failed to meet that standard. Still, almost no
penalties were meted out.
Third, programs can offload academically substandard students without
statistical penalties by having them "transfer" to other programs or
by registering them as having "gone pro." In truth, the Academic
Progress Rate and the Graduation Success Rate serve as smoke screens
for the big-time sports programs to keep exploiting student athletes
without making it possible for many of them to be students. And the
NCAA enables this kind of immoral treatment.
The commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, Jim Delany, told
coalition members in Chicago that the NCAA cannot impose continuing
eligibility standards without considering admissions standards. By
permitting student athletes to attend universities and colleges for
which they are not truly academically prepared, the NCAA is setting
many of them up for failure or for success only by sleight of hand
and/or perversion of the whole notion of true education: through
special conference courses, soft courses taught by sports-booster
faculty, majors designed to be soft, special study centers and
tutors, and simple online courses. And though the NCAA wisely
mandates that student athletes put in no more than 20 hours per week
on sports so they have time to study, its own recent survey shows
that student athletes in big-time sports put in nearly 45 hours per
week.
Gurney knows from long experience what he is talking about. What he
did not say is that the NCAA leadership will never take action that
will kill the golden geese that generate huge television revenues and
support the high salaries of its executives. The greed at student
athletes' expense that we are witnessing now has been with us for at
least 80 years.
Emmert has said that student athletes in big-time sports are students
and should not be compensated by sharing a portion of all the
revenues they generate. His reasoning? They are no different from
students in performance arts like theater and music. Yet that analogy
is false because students in performing arts do not generate money
that pays big salaries to their professors or pays for the buildings
in which they study and perform. Such specious reasoning does little
to defend what is after all an indefensible exploitation of many
big-time student athletes, who, after six, five, four, or fewer
years, are left without degrees, without money in their pockets, and
with nowhere to go.
Thomas G. Palaima is a professor of classics and director of the
program in Aegean scripts and prehistory at the University of Texas
at Austin.
--
Thomas G. Palaima
Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics
Director, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory
1 University Station C3400 Austin, TX 78712-0308
512 471-5742
profile: Thomas Palaima Profile
tpalaima@mail.utexas.edu
See also Tapsearch Com Amazon Friends -
The National Collegiate Athletic Assocation and the Athletes It Fails
The NCAA and the Athletes It Fails
By Thomas G. Palaima - Regular Contributor -
A Tapsearch Top Pick Article
How we treat the young people on our campuses whom we often
euphemistically call "student athletes" is essentially a moral issue.
Some of those students, after all, generate millions of dollars for
their coaches, athletic directors, and institutions, yet we have
failed, in turn, to make sure they have legitimate experiences as
students.
That is one of the concerns of the Coalition on Intercollegiate
Athletics, on which I have served as the representative of the
University of Texas at Austin for the last three years. So I welcomed
the open and honest look at the NCAA's role in big-time college
sports by Gerald S. Gurney that recently appeared in The Chronicle.
What would it entail to do better by those top athletes?
* They need to be placed at educational institutions suited to
their academic preparation and be provided with the tools to play the
most important game of their college careers: the competition with
true peers in the classroom.
* They need to have time to study and to explore elective courses
so as to choose a major and develop secondary interests that will
serve them well the rest of their lives. And they need to do this,
just like regular students, on their own initiative.
* They need to get their degrees before their aid runs out.
* Most of them need to be disabused of the dream that they will "go pro."
As the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association,
Mark A. Emmert, told coalition members at a meeting in Chicago in
January, only a tiny fraction of NCAA student athletes will have
careers as professional athletes. There are about 400,000 student
athletes nationwide, and 99.5 percent of them will spend their lives
doing something other than playing professional sports. Right now
there are grave problems in all four of those areas.
Gurney, who is president of the National Association of Academic
Advisors for Athletics, rightly describes the NCAA's two measures of
how well college athletes are doing in the classroom-the Academic
Progress Rate and the Graduation Success Rate-as "manufactured."
The Academic Progress Rate, or APR, is designed so that students can
be fully compliant even if they complete only 80 percent of the
courses needed for a degree after four years. Moreover, year-to-year
eligibility requirements are lax to the point of being farcical.
Consider U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's complaint about
the poor academic performances, especially in regard to athletes who
belong to minority groups, by many teams in the NCAA March Madness
basketball tournament. If the players are performing so poorly
academically, how can they be eligible for the tournaments? As Duncan
wrote last month in an opinion piece for The Washington Post, "Last
year, out of more than 6,000 NCAA intercollegiate sports teams, one
squad in men's basketball was banned from postseason play because of
a poor academic record."
There are three reasons so many poor academic performers squeaked
through to be eligible to play.
First, the APR makes it possible for students to maintain eligibility
for a season or two with academic-achievement levels that do not
prepare them to finish their degrees. For example, they may complete
as few as two courses in a semester, maintaining average GPA's of 1.8
at the end of their freshman year, 1.9 at the end of their sophomore
year, and 2.0 at the end of three years. In this age of grade
inflation, when the average GPA of all undergraduate students in all
courses at the University of Texas at Austin, for instance, is 3.09,
the sports GPA targets are hardly achievements.
Second, colleges are not penalized for substandard APR performances.
An APR of 925 works out to a 50 percent six-year graduation-success
rate, but according to the results of a study by the NCAA's Committee
on Academic Performance released last fall, 72 of 327 Division I
basketball teams failed to meet that standard. Still, almost no
penalties were meted out.
Third, programs can offload academically substandard students without
statistical penalties by having them "transfer" to other programs or
by registering them as having "gone pro." In truth, the Academic
Progress Rate and the Graduation Success Rate serve as smoke screens
for the big-time sports programs to keep exploiting student athletes
without making it possible for many of them to be students. And the
NCAA enables this kind of immoral treatment.
The commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, Jim Delany, told
coalition members in Chicago that the NCAA cannot impose continuing
eligibility standards without considering admissions standards. By
permitting student athletes to attend universities and colleges for
which they are not truly academically prepared, the NCAA is setting
many of them up for failure or for success only by sleight of hand
and/or perversion of the whole notion of true education: through
special conference courses, soft courses taught by sports-booster
faculty, majors designed to be soft, special study centers and
tutors, and simple online courses. And though the NCAA wisely
mandates that student athletes put in no more than 20 hours per week
on sports so they have time to study, its own recent survey shows
that student athletes in big-time sports put in nearly 45 hours per
week.
Gurney knows from long experience what he is talking about. What he
did not say is that the NCAA leadership will never take action that
will kill the golden geese that generate huge television revenues and
support the high salaries of its executives. The greed at student
athletes' expense that we are witnessing now has been with us for at
least 80 years.
Emmert has said that student athletes in big-time sports are students
and should not be compensated by sharing a portion of all the
revenues they generate. His reasoning? They are no different from
students in performance arts like theater and music. Yet that analogy
is false because students in performing arts do not generate money
that pays big salaries to their professors or pays for the buildings
in which they study and perform. Such specious reasoning does little
to defend what is after all an indefensible exploitation of many
big-time student athletes, who, after six, five, four, or fewer
years, are left without degrees, without money in their pockets, and
with nowhere to go.
Thomas G. Palaima is a professor of classics and director of the
program in Aegean scripts and prehistory at the University of Texas
at Austin.
--
Thomas G. Palaima
Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics
Director, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory
1 University Station C3400 Austin, TX 78712-0308
512 471-5742
profile: Thomas Palaima Profile
tpalaima@mail.utexas.edu
See also Tapsearch Com Amazon Friends -
| 12 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
