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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

MORE READING MATERIAL
FOR UD AS SHE PREPARES…


The ever-larger sums of money spent on college sports create "a looming crisis" that could threaten schools' integrity, a group of university presidents warns.

"The prospect of distortion and even corruption of the academic values of individual institutions is very real, and in time, the entire academic enterprise can be diminished by such disasters," according to a draft version of a report from the NCAA presidential task force's fiscal responsibility subcommittee.

The problem: There's little the NCAA can do to stop its members' athletics spending spree. One ill-fated attempt several years ago — legislation that restricted the earnings of one men's basketball coach on each staff — resulted in a lawsuit that cost the NCAA millions of dollars.

…On Monday, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors deferred until April action on proposals that would revise restrictions on the use of athletes' names or pictures in charitable or educational promotional campaigns.

At least one member of the board expressed concern about those promotional campaign items linking athletes with commercial products that act as partners with the school.

"The using of a student's image to sell a product is for me a slippery slope," University of Georgia President Michael Adams said Sunday.

Universities took a step down that slope years ago with a rule change allowing commercial logos, such as the Nike Swoosh, on team uniforms.

…Cutting baseball to 52 games hits a roadblock

Should baseball teams play 56 or 52 regular-season games? The athletics department and conference administrators and faculty athletics representatives of the Division I management council want the season left at 56 games. Many of the presidents on the Division I Board of Directors want to cut it to 52.

…"A lot of us are concerned about the academic performance of baseball teams," said board member Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford.

Baseball teams performed poorly in the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate.


The Atlanta Journal Constitution