Kids who excel in their church choir, volunteer at their local animal shelter, compete in science fairs, or kick ass at video games don’t get a better education than they otherwise could have. I have no problems with kids playing a sport in college, my issue is with paying them to play via scholarships. Elevating sports above everything else, even in some cases above academics, is the wrong message.
I feel like with some of these Division I football schools like Duke, Penn State and Notre Dame, it’s sort of like “oh yeah…we also do school shit.” The Ivy and Patriot Leagues have more of a “student / athlete” culture. Probably because we suck at football
Exactly. The only virtue (?) being rewarded out of proportion is athleticism. If you can’t see this, if you need me to prove that illiterates are being graduated (or allowed to remain illiterate as long as they play sports for the university), then you’re simply unwilling to see. College sports are a disgrace.
Why don’t you respond to the folks that keep telling you that only a small subset of college sports have this problem? If you’re not interested in discussion why is this in GD?
What school was it? I played baseball in the Big Ten and was never cut any slack by any professor. My only benefit was being given preference enrolling in morning classes (practice in the afternoon) and on rare occasion take a test at a different time from the rest of the class.
Two of my daughter’s high school teammates are on scholarship at the U of Colorado and they have no “athlete track” programs like Sports Management or Agricultural Journalism (Wisconsin). Every athlete has to major in a regular academic subject and be making progress in it semester to semester.
I know that things got a little crazy in the 80’s (Dexter Manley), but things are much tougher now.
Just curious: Why did they change the rules, and what was it like before they did?
It’s not a small subset. Why don’t you ask about other instructors at schools with big athletic programs? They’ll tell you how common this is, and it’s far from my largest issue with athletic programs. I’m sure that non-scholarship sports, and those the university isn’t heavily invested in, are less corrupt, and I’m surer that intermural sports at the college are pretty much not corrupt. But programs where they have millions riding on athletes’ backs? Irretreivably corrupt, in my experience.
Look, if anyone else asked me to falsify a student’s academic record, I’d have told him to get the fuck out of my office, but I was advised (by my chair) to be deferential to anyone from the athletic program who came by to speak with me about a student’s grade. I thought “Sorry, can’t help you,” was sufficiently deferential (as opposed to “Get your fat ass out of here right now”) but it turned out that the working definition of “deferential” was to pass the little plagiarist.
Well his experience certainly mirrors mine as a GA at two schools in the 1990s. Both were basically basketball schools with big name coaches. The basketball players were so far out of their depth academically it wasn’t funny. Their “tutors” shamelessly did their homework for them, and went to bat for them disputing their grading. The professors who allowed us no leeway on grading quizzes, homeworks and exams under normal circumstances, were extremely “ambivalent” about requests from the basketball players. Very quickly I figured out that this meant I was supposed to make every grade a “C” or better, otherwise I would keep doing it again and again. If anyone else pulled the stunts these guys did, they would be royally piss off the prof.
Part of the problem was that the faculty was even more invested in the success of the basketball team than the students were.
On the other hand, one of the GAs at the first school was a tutor for the women’s basketball team. They got no breaks at all, except for occasional rescheduling of exams. They were fantastically organized, and needed to be, to keep up with their practice, games and academics. The GA was a former player herself and graduated with a 3.5+ GPA, IIRC. I never had any issues with the football players either. They were definitely not in the same league academically as the rest of the student body, but they had to muddle through and get those Cs on their own.
Even if all the programs with millions riding on the athletes’ backs are corrupt (and they might be) how small a subset is that of college sports programs as a whole? There are something like 4000 colleges in the US , and most of them probably have some sort of athletic program, if only intramural teams. Not that you’d necessarily know it by looking - I knew my college had a baseball team only because there was a field. No team memorabilia in the bookstore, no rallys, no lining up days in advance for tickets.The teams got about as much attention as the French club.
Football is not athletics, it’s a sport.
Athletics focus on the capability of an individual to perform extraordinary feats in physical challenges. Consider track & field competitions.
Sports are individual or team endeavors, many of them with highly physical demands on the participants, that have a monetary profit as the primary goal.
You may have meant: College sports should be banned… instead of athletics.
Thank you for that useful definition. I would like a copy of your personal dictionary—I will consult it in the future before posting. I meant “athletic programs,” by “athletics”–particularly those with large budgets devoted to scholarships and huge salaries for coaches’ salaries, facilities, etc.
PRR I like you, but you are all wet here. I absolutely believe you have experienced corruption first hand, I believe others have as well, but this is GD not IMHO. You have to bring more than anecdotes and requests for the reader to poll others. Give us some meat to digest. I can think of several instances at schools in my area, perhaps with some digging you can show us how widespread this is? That it is rampant enough to deserve dismantling the entire system.
As an aside, if you knew NCAA violations were occurring, and in fact were asked to assist in those violations, did you report them to the NCAA?
Lastly, how do you feel about Div-III athletics? Athletic scholarships are not allowed. If they are to get anything, student athletes have to qualify for merit based academic scholarships. Of course there has been fraud and cheating here as I noted in a previous post, but overall it is a system that seems to honor and value academic achievement at a premium to athletics.
Sorry, all I have is anecdotal, but it’s pretty widespread–as an intramural player at an Ivy League college, where I saw very little corruption (though I’m sure there was the possibility) to an instructor at a school where there was a hopeless, deeply entrenched culture of corruption (grading issues, which I regularly witnessed firsthand, and second-hand, and recruiting violations, and illiterate athletes who didn’t want help, and lots of other serious problems), to a professor at a Division II championship school–I’ve seen enough corruption tolerated and systematized to know that this is a huge problem that won’t go away easily because of apologists and “sports fans.”
What I want to debate can be debated by looking at Paterno now. People were willing to overlook the most basic of gross crimes right in front of their eyes because they thought that reporting the crimes to the authorities would be ignored and that reporting them might endanger the innocent reporter. Is there a better working definition of “hopelessly entrenched corruption” than that?
I have no problem with recreational athletics, or a higher standard for student-athletes than for regular students, but I don’t see that being the norm under discussion.
I would have no problem banning college football.
I would have a problem banning Olympic athletics.
Banning college football would cause a national outrage though.
Anal rape of 12-year olds may get almost as much outrage. Probably not–Go, U.S.A.!!!
You got it wrong. That was a 10 year old.
What could replace the dozen of million of $$ of the college football income of Penn State U? Nothing.
Only human decency.
Neither McQueary or Paterno seem to have any of it.
So goes for all of their supporters.
And I have thousands of programs on my side that show no appearance of corruption and no favoritism to their athletes. You have what several dozen big programs with big problems?
Not to mention you have gone completely off the rails by resorting to that tired old crutch of calling anyone who disagrees and apologist. While defending my side of the argument, I’ve researched and posted more in this thread to support your argument than even you have. Apologist? :dubious:
I think it is safe to say that Paterno and Penn state are the exception when evaluating the whole of college athletics.
You have clearly established that you were involved in violating NCAA rules. Did you feel that you or your employment was in jeopardy if reported these violations?
In cases where violations were not reported, is that just further enabling the corruption? Heck there is academic fraud going on all the time without athletics to blame. The difference being that it can be reported with less chance of retribution. Maybe the answer lies not in cutting off the nose to spite the face, but in finding ways to enable and embolden whistle-blowers and reporters in and around these large programs. Or maybe just the large programs have to go. Huge sums of money lead to great influence and power which increases the likelihood of corruption. But banning all college athletics? Maybe, just maybe as a last resort after every other possibility has been exhausted.
Why is “safe to say”? I think it’s very dangerous, even foolish, to say. Until last week, Paterno and Penn State were exemplars of honor and respectibility among college coaches and athletic programs. Now, what–“Oops”? “Hey, it’s only one systematic coverup of a child rape scandal? Haven’t you got more evidence than that?”
I for one, refused to do it. And in the cases I witnessed, there was no way to prove that the professor was wink, wink, nod, nod, encouraging me to pass the basketball players. He would just keep asking me to take another look, because the tutors of the basketball stars were asking him to “review” the grading.
In the case of one professor, the first time I would find out who the student was, was when the professor asked me to look at the papers again. He would assign a random number to each student, which was put down on the answer sheet. Only the professor could identify the papers. But of course once the tutors got involved, you could identify the students.
Technically anyone could get a tutor, based on their academic need. Magically, the only ones who ever got assigned tutors were the basketball players, and a couple of learning disabled students who had put in a herculean effort to get into college in the first place.
I was a GA in a freshman accounting class and a freshman econ class. Most of the answers were very, very easy to determine if the answer was right or wrong.
It is not a sport. it is business, big business. When you put over 100,000 people in the seats at high prices, it is far from a sport anymore.
This is America. Money speaks. A kid getting raped is bad, terrible is allowing it to effect the gate receipts. Coaches can make 5 million a year. Colleges build huge stadiums and training facilities. They cheat like hell to win. The players take drugs .They allow criminals into college to play sports.
The whole system is a reflection of American values. If it makes money, screw the values. Break rules . Ignore infractions. Buy off regulators.