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Monday, May 08, 2006

To Summarize...

US News and World Report on college sports -- a few excerpts:


[A] schism ... often exists between college athletics and the wider academic community. Student athletes have long inhabited a world often less focused on learning than on winning. But what is becoming more apparent today is that the divide is widening--and that it can lead to destructive behavior...

...[H]istorically, it has been athletics that have caused the greatest conflicts with the true mission of higher education. As far back as 1929, the Carnegie Foundation published a report on collegiate athletics bemoaning lax oversight, high coaching salaries, and low academic standards. Sixty-two years later, reports by the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics came to the same conclusions.


Gordon Gee, chancellor, Vanderbilt:

"The reforms [we instituted] were partly about who was in charge--the university president or a coach." Despite dire warnings to the contrary, the Division I school has continued to field competitive teams. Likewise, the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., recently reassigned the head of athletics so that he now reports to the commandant of cadets.

..."Over the past 20 years, athletics have established separate departments with separate missions: win and raise money, which isn't supposed to be the mission of a school," says Peter Roby, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society.