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Monday, October 15, 2007
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Sex as a Recruiting Tool "So then it looked as though my university, the University of Colorado, was using sex as a recruitment tool." UD's now at a smaller Knight Commission session devoted to particularly sordid sports disasters on particular campuses. Scott Adler's taking us on a trip down memory lane, as we recall events a few years ago at Boulder, when scandals bloomed like wisteria... Then a guy from Duke rehearses the details of the lacrosse mess, which "generated so much deep emotion," with its elements of race, sex, sport, and privilege. Things have changed a good deal on campus, he says. For instance, "the university's effort to treat student athletes like other students made it hard to identify patterns of behavior" among the players that should have alerted Duke to a problem in the making. Now Nathan talks about the University of Oregon. But he starts with some general stuff. "Tens of thousands of Division One athletes fail to graduate. Faculty is ignoring its responsibility to educate." Here's what faculty has to do: 1. Admit that there's a problem. 2. Use Colorado and Duke as models of how problems can actually be solved. (UD's own problem with this is that she doubts either campus has really solved much. Things are different here and there, but she assumes little has really changed.] 3. There needs to be academic disclosure. Faculty has to have access to details of courses and grades for all athletes, so that academic fraud, of the sort Auburn specializes in, can be avoided. "We faculty have to police ourselves." The Duke guy, though, sums up the real problem for faculty involvement. "A lot of faculty think this whole athletics thing is totally corrupt." |