<p>I would support a system like that. Participating in a sport at that level requires a high level of commitment and dedication. I think it can be worth some academic credits but I don’t think that it should take the place of all academic subjects. I don’t mind helping a little bit but if it goes too far it defeats the purpose of gpa requirements in the first place.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of employment opportunity in sports. I think any major has to have academics involved. So, handle the gen eds everyone needs. Then let the sports stuff be the major, like in theater, or business, or any other major. </p>
<p>If a kid has to go an extra year to graduate? So what. They measure six year grad rates anyway, for a reason. </p>
<p>And who is going to pay for that extra year or two?</p>
<p>I believe scholarship athletes should be covered thru graduation. Particularly in massively time consuming revenue sports. Playing on these teams shd not be all give and no get. They should receive an education in exchange. If it takes five or six years? Fine. </p>
<p>My niece received one credit per semester for her participation in her sport at the club level. My daughter plays her sport at a club level and does not receive a credit, but she does it for the exercise and because she likes it. The school does subsidize it, so she’s actually paying less than we’ve paid for years for her to play.</p>
<p>My other daughter has an athletic scholarship, and I consider it more like work study - she gets a scholarship for her time, and has no extra time to work. One girl on her team also has work study, and I have no idea how she fits it all in.</p>
<p>I find it remarkable that people don’t think musical theater is a ‘real’ major, or painting or sports. How about drums or Aztec ruins or TV production? If the ‘drums’ major just got to bang on drums all day, that wouldn’t be much of a college education, but usually the major is in the music department and there are a lot of requirements for music theory, directing, history, foreign language, etc. I’d have no problem with a university offering courses in video poke or, Texas Hold 'em, but assume there would be much more required to get a degree. A school could design a major around football or basketball, but there would still be the other requirements for a BA or BS - social sciences, hard sciences, arts.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s the problem though. In order to construct a BA or a BS around anything you have to have all of these other requirements. The administrators behind these ‘paper’ courses don’t believe the athletes can handle classwork of any form. There’s nothing conceptually wrong with football or basketball as a major in that sense, but if the goal of the major is solely to pad the GPA to meet eligibility requirements then that pretty much means that they have to be ‘paper’ courses. After all, any “real” major requires some form of work besides extracurricular activities and if the admins don’t respect the players enough to ask them to pay attention to schoolwork and if that’s true I don’t see why they should bother having a major at all. Just revoke the GPA requirement.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The fact that the problem started before most of the current UNC students were born, and was denied and minimized for well over a decade will probably count as a minus. And, actually, what corrective action has UNC taken? Crowder retired by her own choice. Nyang’oro was investigated by the police, not UNC.</p>
<p>It’s one department. Please read the report. </p>
<p>Please read the addenda in which crowder explains why she did what she did and how. A lot of it was different than you think</p>
<p>PBS interview last night from the Newshour:
<a href=“Why did no one flag UNC’s bogus classes? | PBS NewsHour”>http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/one-flag-uncs-bogus-classes/</a></p>
<p>John Wooden was an exemplary man and teacher. Show me where he failed and I might change my mind. Ask Wooden’s scholarly players like Abdul-Jabbar, Fred Slaughter, Mike Warren and Bill Walton. Those guys read a book or two in college, got their degrees and have had notable careers of the court. Wooden had a lot to do with that. He would have known if his players were frauds.</p>
<p>John Wooden, Dean Smith, etc. operated in a very different system. College sports culture is driven by Espn now, tv money, and it drives divisions, etc. it’s a business now, and I think this is sooo unfortunate. For the student athletes above all. Nobody could be wooden in a major D1 program. I think they exist at great D3 schools!!!</p>
<p>Dean Smith probably would have adjusted better to today’s system than Wooden. Smith went against prevailing trends when he believed the end result was moral and just. I admired his success (except for the dreadful 4-corners stall offense) and thought very highly of him because, among other things, he essentially integrated the ACC and called out opposing teams and fans for being racist. Legend has it that is one reason why he urged Charlie Scott, one of the first Black stars of the ACC, to leave UNC early to turn pro.</p>
<p>It has been well documented that during teh years of Wooden’s success at UCLA, his players were being paid under the table.</p>
<p><a href=“The other part of the Wooden legacy - ESPN - Men's College Basketball Blog- ESPN”>http://espn.go.com/blog/collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/12227/the-other-part-of-the-wooden-legacy</a></p>
<p>In addition, the academic scandal started at North Carolina several years before Smith retired.</p>
<p>Given smiths altzeimers, I’m not getting into that. He was a great man</p>
<p>I read the report. I also read the addenda. That it was only one department is a defense for all the other departments, which are honest departments requiring real academic work. But it is not a defense for the university: they looked the other way in the face of repeated reports that athletes were taking sham courses.</p>
<p>I also understand why Crowder started the sham program: because she was sorry for underprepared athletes who were admitted to UNC but were unable or unwilling to do the work. Pretending they did it is a deeply offensive solution to that serious problem.</p>
<p>John Wooden had no connection to Sam Gilbert (I think that was his name), the wealthy booster whose enthusiasm got in the way of integrity.</p>
<p>The solution to athletes being underprepared and overwhelmed with academics should have been to offer them aid so they could afford to stretch out their degree requirements over 5 years, not to let them take fake classes. (I assume they were already being offered tutoring outside of class.)</p>
<h2>There has been some discussion recently about Div I schools offering aid so that athletes have extra time to graduate, even if it involves coming back to the college after a couple years in the pros. </h2>
<p>I’d like to see Div III schools be able to offer $2k a year athletic scholarships. It would basically make up for their inability to have a part-time job during much of the school year. </p>
<p>Oh, come on. Even Wooden conceded that he was probably willfully blind to the situation.</p>
<p>With respect to the North Carolina cesspool, if it was Bob Hudgens rather than one of the designated saintly heroes of college coaching, no one would care that he had Alzheimers now, and frankly, people would have been all over the situation years ago.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that Wooden and Smith didn’t help a number of kids. For that matter, so has Hudgens. Nor I am saying that Wooden and Smith weren’t generally good people. But we have to be realistic.</p>
<p>
It’s going to take a lot more than 5 years for many of these football players to graduate:</p>
<p>Some college athletes read at 5th-grade level
<a href=“http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading-scores/”>CNN: Some college athletes play like adults, read like 5th-graders - CNN;
</p>