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While every news outlet in the country gets enraged at the president of the University of Maryland for stating the obvious…

… about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill having so corrupted itself via athletics that it deserves the NCAA’s death penalty, life goes on at the increasingly pathetic UNC. Yesterday the Faculty Athletic Committee met to discuss this and that. Let’s listen in.

The chancellor kicks things off with an insipid pep talk.

“People come here every single year because of sports engagements, and they get very excited about a national championship, but they come for the other athletic performances too and they come for our arts and our other academic performances.”

Are you excited yet? Well, how about this!

The Faculty Athletics Committee met Tuesday to discuss students missing classes for the men’s basketball national championship game in Arizona… Committee members also wanted to address the issue of cheerleaders and band members missing classes to travel during the postseason.

FAC Chairperson John Stephens brought up the concerns of one biology professor who said students in the pep band missed as many as eight classes between the ACC and NCAA tournaments — almost one quarter of the semester.

Associate Athletic Director for Strategic Communications Robbi Evans said athletes were required to travel earlier because of media obligations, but cheerleaders and band members are not required to go to the game and must receive permission from their professors.

FAC member Andrew Perrin said he agrees that the community has benefitted from the national championship, but reminded the committee that everything good comes at a cost.

“For us to just sit around a table and talk about how fantastically wonderful it is that we won the championship and how many people were involved in it — I think we need to recognize that it’s not just lectures that get missed, it’s labs, it’s discussions, it’s experiential and participatory education,” Perrin said.

Yes, they must get permission, and I’m gonna be the professor at UNC who refuses Bob, The Team Barker, permission! Watch me! Watch me refuse permission! Because this is a serious school and I’m a serious person!

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And yes, in case you hadn’t thought about this yet, it’s not just the players who don’t go to class. It’s cheerleaders, the pep band – all the people who shake their ass for ten minutes and then plant it on a bleacher for three hours… All of them need to be absent too…

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But UD hasn’t gotten to the best part. What is a Faculty Athletics Committee, anyway?

It’s a carefully selected group of jock-adoring professors whose job it is to make little speeches like Andrew Perrin’s up there… About how, you know, it’s kind of not cool that our chancellor gives semi-literate sermons on the superduper superness of sports even in the shadow of our recent notorious academic fraud scandal… And that many students who are only tangentially associated with sports at this university routinely blow off class…

Yes, the chancellor does her inane enthusiasm thing, and the FAC professor does his inane Is this really a good idea? thing, and the UNC farce keeps rolling along until the next scandal…

Margaret Soltan, April 12, 2017 1:58AM
Posted in: sport

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6 Responses to “While every news outlet in the country gets enraged at the president of the University of Maryland for stating the obvious…”

  1. Jay Smith Says:

    At North Carolina, We’re #1! The Chancellor takes “insipid” to new heights. Our FAC has perfected pusillanimity. Word has it that the FAC last year commissioned a “study” to determine how many hours athletes are really required to put into their sports. The numbers were pretty staggering. So the athletic department requested that the study be deep-sixed. And it was. As one of my colleagues put it, no need to inquire further about time demands on athletes, since the FAC “has already gathered the information and buried it.”

  2. JackOH Says:

    ” . . .[S]tudy be deep-sixed.” ” . . .[N]o need to inquire further . . .”.

    My local Podunk Tech uses the “buried study” also as one of its suite of cover up-and shut up tools. “Yes, by gosh, that’s shocking, and, trust me, we’re looking into it.” Yes, yes they are looking into it.

  3. theprofessor Says:

    Actually, there is another type of usual suspect on faculty athletic committees besides the jock-sniffers. These are the people who may not be too keen on sports themselves, but wring their hands over any kind of divisiveness. They are perfectly willing to abase themselves before the AD and other senior administrators by approving the current team schedules halfway through the semester and shutting up when the AD tells them that the students on Team X will have to miss more than the maximum number of classes we supposedly have set as a hard limit.

  4. charlie Says:

    i’m guessing that the folks who sit on the fac get paid for their ‘input.’

  5. theprofessor Says:

    The amazing thing, Charlie, is that other than good seats (and sometimes not even that), there are faculty members who are happy to disgrace themselves for free.

  6. Jack/OH Says:

    Some people–a very few–at my Podunk Tech work under their own shingle. They don’t give a damn about academics. I repeat–they don’t give a damn about academics.

    They just want to milk the goodwill and revenues generated by professors for their own purposes. They know they’re “working it”. They make more money at a campus job, often more than profs, than they’d earn elsewhere. No one stops them. Not the president, provost, trustees–no one. Even when their actions risk civil and criminal exposure, no one dares to formally reprimand them.

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