From the General Secretary: Good Sports
By Mary A. Burgan
Reporting on the breakout of a particularly egregious scandal in intercollegiate athletics last year, a national newspaper asked how such abuses could have continued for so long? Why had no one in the institution blown the whistle earlier? Such questions struck AAUP colleagues at that school as painfully ironic, given the fact that the institution had long had a spot on the AAUP's censure list for violations of faculty tenure and governance.
If members of the board of trustees had not been deaf to the voices of loyal faculty at their school—one of whom had commented on the poor preparation of athletes in his classes—they would have been more alert to the possibility of mischief afoot. Other sports scandals have tended to reveal the same systemic breakdowns; when the athletics program is out of control, the faculty voice in governance is also likely to be muted.
That is why the AAUP's Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication recently took up the issue of student athletics, revisiting the Association's earlier statements and adding guidelines for better oversight through faculty governance in its 2003 report, The Faculty Role in the Reform of Intercollegiate Athletics. Simultaneously, a group of faculty leaders in major universities around the country (the "Bowl Conference Schools")—many of whom had al-ready begun to draw up programs of reform—banded together to form a coalition that would address the need for better faculty control of college sports. Two issues that bind all these efforts are the questions of financial transparency and educational priorities. But the most important issue is the welfare of individual student athletes.
One problem with keeping student athletes present in our debates may be our distance from them, especially at big schools where undergraduate superstars may be in our sight only on Saturday's TV screen. I've realized that I rarely came into contact with athletes when I was teaching. My only encounter with athletes as a group was in proctoring a first-year class that met in the old gym at the University of Illinois when I was a teaching assistant. As these football players wrote in silence for an hour, I began to feel strangely claustrophobic. And then when they crowded around my desk to hand in papers, I felt the need for air—their sheer presence seemed to use up all the oxygen in the small room. These were the biggest men I had ever seen—creatures from another realm. They moved with the grace of such great bodily power that their careful presence with ordinary bodies was marked by a kind of modesty. These were not the jocks that we all tended to stereotype when we talked about problem students in first-year comp.
I realized then that athletes were special, but until recently, I have not really thought about what being on campus meant for them. Then last summer I worked with a young woman who had gone to college on a basketball scholarship. She remarked one day at the end of a conference that she needed to rush away for her daily workout. I observed that intense physical training must have become a way of life for her as an athlete. "Not at all," she informed me, "I need to fit into a wedding dress in two months. Otherwise, I steer clear of the gym."
Then the story of her career as a star athlete unfolded. She had gone to a school she couldn't otherwise afford because of a basketball scholarship, but when she got there, the pressure was so intense that her studies suffered. When there wasn't practice, there was weight training. And the schedule of the games often conflicted with class meetings and exams. "Besides," she told me, "you can't imagine how tired you get. All the time." She finally quit the team, but not without guilt for leaving her teammates in the lurch. The decision was made easier by another prominent element of the student athlete experience—a knee injury that required extensive surgery and painful rehabilitation.
Sometimes the call for reform of college sports barely imagines the courage and thoughtfulness of such students. They are gifted, and burdened, with admirable physical endowments that are so visible that they may lend themselves to exploitation. It is true that faculty should exert better oversight over athletics. But in doing so, they would benefit from knowing more student athletes. Many are "good sports" who come to school to learn.
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