That would be at UNC, part of what will likely be a long series of revelations:
On three occasions, the records show two athlete support program counselors offered football tickets and food to Nyang’oro and his family. In one, Reynolds told Nyang’oro he would be “guest coaching,” which meant that he could watch the game with the team on the sidelines.
The Ducks also have a guest coach program for cooperative UO faculty teaching classes to athletes. Turns out they’re not supposed to do that, appearance of potential conflict of interest and so on:
The National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics, a professional standards group, warns academic support programs about offering tickets or other perks to professors who teach their athletes. While not an outright prohibition, the group’s code of ethics says its members “should never be party to the offer of tickets, trips, sideline passes, autographed memorabilia or any other items that would constitute bartering for a grade with an instructor.”
The NAAAA held its annual meeting at UO in October. Program here. Speaking of conflicts of interest, one of the speakers was Lorraine Davis, whose special favors from the athletics department included trips to the Rose Bowl for self and family.
Lorraine G. Davis, Ph.D., Special Assistant to the President and Provost, University of Oregon.
Lorraine Davis currently serves as the Special Assistant to the President and Provost at the University of Oregon. She joined the UO faculty in 1972 and was vice president for academic affairs from 2001 to 2006. All of the deans of the university’s schools and colleges reported to Davis when she was vice president. She previously served as graduate coordinator and department head in the university’s school and community health program before being appointed vice provost for academic personnel in 1990. In 2009-10 she served as Interim Athletic Director and in 2011-12, she served that campus as the Interim Provost. In her current role, Lorraine oversees Support Services for Student Athletes, and is deputy administrator of the E.C. Brown Foundation and Trust, a philanthropic health education organization.
There may be legitimate concerns here, but your statement that guest coaches are “cooperative faculty teaching classes to athletes” is, on my experience, overdrawn. I believe I was one of the first faculty to question athletic influence; I made a proposal to the UO senate well over a decade ago bemoaning the impact of games on the academic schedule (the proposal achieved nothing). Also, I taught mainly upper division philosophy classes that attracted, to my knowledge, exactly one basketball player in my thirty plus years at it. Still, I was invited to be guest coach and found the experience interesting for its perspective on the whole football thing. I learned that the sideline was not a good spot to watch a game.
At UO there’s no explicit tit-for-tat. It’s mostly an attempt to show faculty why the footballers sleep through your lectures.