June 18

Universities Under the Influence

By UD

With her interest in the grotesqueries of bigtime university sports, UD has read tons of reports from tons of influential organizations about how to reform them. The Knight Commission is particularly fond of glossy publications packed with great ideas about academic integrity, financial accountability, and how to attract non-felonious people to your team.

Today’s IHE links to the most recent of these reports, from a faculty group, the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. IHE summarizes:

[M]any of the recommendations [call] for an enhanced role for professors in overseeing sports programs. The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics is calling for the creation of a Campus Athletic Board at each campus, a majority of whose members would be tenured professors selected through faculty governance structures. This board would have to be consulted on all major athletics decisions, including the hiring of key officials, changes in the number of sports offered, and adding significant facilities. Other recommendations are designed to assure the primacy of academic values. For example, one recommendation is that admissions standards should be the same for all students, regardless of whether they are athletes, and that athletes “should be admitted based on their potential for academic success and not primarily on their athletic contribution.”

Well, UD‘ll read it... She reads all of these things... But listen. People like to say that the epicenter of power at American universities is the faculty, and in some ways this is true. But anyone aware of the money and power of bigtime athletics — not just the money and power... the huge grip bigtime athletics has on the imagination of these institutions, the way it just is Oklahoma State or whatever, and indeed the way it reaches into the communities surrounding these schools, knows that no bunch of faculty members (many of whom will evolve into tools rather than monitors of their school’s teams) is going to be able to do what this latest report wants them to do.

Serious reform of bigtime athletics is impossible as long as television exists. We’ll have to wait until the sun implodes.

Comments

NCAA and Academics

I can see the job posting now “...team allegiance and general knowledge of college sports desirable". Each time the direction of a program is changed by a rising need by the university for one thing or another, slowy erodes at a department and its standards for quality research, academics, and student achievment. Not unlike the impact on our programs by corporations wanting a higher level of techno-literacy, many universities focused two positions towards folks who were, shall we say, technophiliacs rather than theoretically inclined/informed. Reforms such as the proposed call for governance of university athletics by tenured professors will follow the same direction that the technology reform in that instead of taking time away from existing scholarship (learning how to do technology and Shakespeare) political hirings for sports enthusiast with a generalist knowledge of writing and literature will ensue. Eventually, these external demands /reforms cause the mishaping of goals as educators in that we do not respond to needs from the internal position but from external pressure placed upon us by “special interest” groups where we might find temporaneous financial rewards.

DIA, Special Hirings for Sport Enthusiast?, at 10:05 am EDT on June 18, 2007

And the ads will also say...

“Prior participation in Division I sports preferred.” (Just so they know about it, ya know, and so we can be sure they’ll be one of us.)

Reader, at 4:15 pm EDT on June 18, 2007