If there’s one thing the jocks understand it’s how to take the rules and run with them. Today’s excellent story in Inside Higher Ed, by Gerald Gurney and Richard M. Southall, dissects the 2003 NCAA academic reforms – pushed by former UO Pres Myles Brand – and shows how they have been subverted by athletic departments and cooperative central administrators:
Presidents of Division I universities, with the assistance of their athletics programs and some faculty enamored with athletics, knowingly accept watered-down curriculums for specially admitted underprepared athletes as the price of big-time college sport. They willingly leverage loose admissions standards with special exceptions reserved for athletes, massive remedial programs and less rigorous academic majors to maintain or achieve winning programs to keep their donors and regents pleased and proud. The promise of a world-class education and opportunity is a great hoax.
Read it all, reflect on how much of this is happening at UO, and think about what we can do about it, here, soon. Let’s start with having President Gottfredson giving the faculty access to the data on academic performance which the Senate unanimously asked him to provide by last month. 2/14/13.
You left out this excerpt:
Presidents of Division I universities, with the assistance of their athletics programs and some faculty enamored with athletics, knowingly accept watered-down curriculums for specially admitted underprepared athletes as the price of big-time college sport. They willingly leverage loose admissions standards with special exceptions reserved for athletes, massive remedial programs and less rigorous academic majors to maintain or achieve winning programs to keep their donors and regents pleased and proud. The promise of a world-class education and opportunity is a great hoax.
yup, and that really says it all. Fixed.