By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
When Jonathan Swift used the term “a modest proposal” in reference to Great Britain’s approach to poverty in Ireland, he was using the term sarcastically. I am not. I am about to offer a sincere proposal for how our colleges can clean up the scandals revolving around the academic standing of their athletes. The recent reports of how basketball and football players at the University of North Carolina were permitted to take courses with inconsequential academic requirements are just the latest indication that something must be done about college athletics.
This is not a new problem, of course. I can remember hearing stories when I was in high school from people who seemed to have the “inside scoop” about some very famous college athletes — you would know the names — who were said to seldom attend class and were paid very well by alumni boosters for their efforts. I can recall a story — I think it was in Sports Illustrated — around the same time about Jim Taylor, the outstanding Green Bay Packer running back. The article reported he was “virtually untouched by the academic experience at LSU.”
But things seem to be getting worse. Walter Williams devoted a recent column to the reports coming out of the University of North Carolina. He writes of an investigation at the Chapel Hill campus of the university that discovered more than 3,100 students who had received credit for over 20 years now “for taking nonexistent phantom classes in the university’s department of African and African-American studies, lecture courses that never met.” The athletes were “required to turn in a single paper. The papers were often plagiarized or padded with fluff. The students were given A’s or B’s after a cursory read.”
The professor for many of these courses was the department chairman, Julius Nyang’oro. He kept contact with the university’s “academic support program for student-athletes,” which notified him of “what grades students needed to remain academically or athletically eligible.”
The good professor did the rest. I suspect you will be pleased to hear that Nyang’oro, who retired in 2012, has been indicted by a grand jury in North Carolina on what Williams describes as “a felony charge for taking money for a class he didn’t teach.” Former UNC basketball player Rashad McCants told ESPN that he was given top grades in classes that did not require his attendance and that his papers were done for him by tutors assigned to him by the university.
Why do our colleges permit this fraud to take place? Williams points to the $20 million the UNC basketball team earns for the university and the $22 million the football team generates. “Basketball and football coaches are paid salaries in excess of $2 million,” he notes.
It does not excuse the players who participate in this deception, and certainly not the universities that permit it, to observe that a young man who wants to become a professional basketball or football player — except in very rare cases — cannot do that without playing these sports in college. There are no minor leagues such as in baseball where a player without academic interests can develop and showcase his athletic skills for the professional scouts. Neither can we excuse these scandals by pointing to the great enjoyment so many college students, alumni, and fans get from the spectacle of college sports. A scam is a scam.
What to do then? End the charade. Here is my modest proposal: The NCAA should appoint teams of impartial examiners who will be charged with the responsibility of conducting regular investigations into the academic records of student-athletes. The colleges have made it clear that they are incapable of handling this responsibility on their own. The University of North Carolina is not the only institution where a mockery has been made of the requirement that athletes attend class and maintain a minimum level of scholastic achievement.
Might these teams of examiners be fooled by assignments prepared for athletes by someone else? They might. No system will be perfect. There are fraternity houses, I have been told (I commuted to college and was never a member of a fraternity), where there are file cabinets full of research papers written by members of the fraternity over the years, available for a quick reproduction by a fraternity member in need. Perhaps the examiners in charge of keeping student-athletes academically honest could come up with a database that can keep track of this issue. An inefficient check on this sort of thing would be better than no check at all, which seems to be what we have now at many schools.
But wouldn’t cracking down in this manner end the dreams for an athletic career of many young men, especially minorities coming from deprived backgrounds? Not necessarily. We should keep in mind that attending college these days, especially at our large state universities, does not require a student to tackle demanding courses in mathematics, science, and the arts. Just for the heck of it, I checked on the Internet the majors that are offered at Florida State University. The school has an impressive offering of fields of study, everything from electrical engineering to biochemistry to classical languages.
But it also offers majors in Dance, Exercise Science, Hospitality Management, Professional Golf Management, Sports Management, and Women’s Studies. Now it well may be that some of these majors are serious about their mission, staffed with professors who require commitment and performance from their students. I have no way to check them out. My point is only that in a large university courses can be found for student-athletes that are not as demanding as electrical engineering or biochemistry, courses where a student can earn a C-level grade by attending the class fairly regularly and doing a relatively small amount of academic work. The least we can demand of athletes attending college is that they meet this requirement.
In fact, my modest proposal would go even further: If colleges wanted to assign academic counselors to student-athletes to guide them toward the least demanding courses and majors available at a university, there should be no objections. It would be acceptable for me to discover that large numbers of college athletes take easy courses. A college athlete should have the right to take courses that do not enhance his employment prospects after he leaves school. Non-athletes can do that.
But the athlete has no right to make a mockery of what it means to be a student at the university. What has to end is the deception being perpetrated today, a deception taking place because of the willingness of college administrators — at the very least — to look the other way.
Would such a requirement put colleges that do not offer less demanding courses of study at a disadvantage? It would. But we live with that situation now. Stanford and Notre Dame, for example, have been able to compete with the best Division One colleges, even though they are unable to recruit outstanding athletes who cannot meet their academic requirements.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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