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(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, December 14, 2006

This Story's Moving Faster Than
A Drunk Linebacker in a Hummer


First it said it wouldn't; now it says it will. For a few hours, Auburn tried to dismiss its latest athletic scandal as a purely academic, more of the same, nothing to see here sort of thing. It wasn't going to send to the NCAA results of its internal audit involving phantom courses and illegally entered grades. I mean, why bother? What else is new? It only involved a couple of athletes...

Now it's changed its mind and is busily sending off the results of the thing to the NCAA:

Auburn University reversed position Wednesday and said it would forward to the NCAA relevant information from an internal audit examining grade changes.

The audit showed that a grade for at least one scholarship athlete was changed without the knowledge of the student's professor. The change allowed the athlete to barely finish above the 2.0 grade-point averaged needed to graduate.

...Auburn continued to maintain any grade changes were not coerced by the athletics department.


That last sentence is a beaut.




James Gundlach, the professor who broke the Auburn story, may testify in Washington:

"It's been indicated to me that Democrats really want to increase Pell grants but are facing an issue of pay as you go," Gundlach said. "So cutting the tax-exempt status on big-time athletics could put a whole lot of poor kids through college and would be very much the kind of things Democrats would like to point at by the time 2008 came around."

Hearings would include examining whether big-time athletics really promotes education. Gundlach was approached last summer by the House Ways and Means Committee about possibly testifying.

"I'm still interested in testifying," Gundlach said. "The thing that makes big-time sports actually detrimental to education is it has too much money. Too much money, too much power, too much influence."