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A review by jjupille
Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports by Mary Willingham, Jay M. Smith
4.0
This is the kind of book that will leave those of us trying to reconcile academics and athletics in cold sweats. Below I'll just bullet some of the stuff I underlined and noted, but let me try on a few more general notes-to-self, most pretty obvious.
The money and prestige of big-time athletics corrupts. Getting good people is great, but we have to get the institutions right. To me, that especially means that *faculty* need to play more of a role in governing intercollegiate athletics, in insisting on the primacy of the academic mission, in oversight, in articulating the vision, in policing ourselves and our administrators and our coaches. The book ends by insisting on the centrality of the faculty-student nexus. The most magical aspect of faculty life is the joy of working with young people to help them blaze their own trails. We don't need to explore the world in search of the fountain of youth, we find it right in front of us and all around us, every day. We must relentlessly prioritize our students, from the faculty point of view - not by cutting paths of least resistance for them, which some probably-well-meaning folks like Debbie Crowder and lots of learning specialists did at UNC, but by challenging our students to learn and grow, all while helping them along.
What went wrong at UNC? So, so much.
Lots of individuals engaged in misguided or bad acts. The aforementioned Debbie Crowder (admin in the Africana and Afro-American Studies department at UNC) was almost certainly well-intentioned, sympathetic to lots of students who had been and were being exploited for their physical gifts but insufficiently invested-in in other respects. The chair of that department, Julius Nyang'oro, may well have shared that motivation, but we don't really get any view of him. He comes off as mostly just corrupt, a sports fan in a position to help Carolina athletics and enjoy lots of perks (money, tickets, trips, etc.) in return. Other individual faculty and some departments seem subject to the same assessment. The Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR), the chair of the faculty senate, and lots of deanlets, deans, and higher-ups evince multiple varieties of venality, careerism, cover-your-assism and wilful indifference. Coaches? Let me just say F Mack Brown, F Butch Davis, and F Roy Williams (the man must be blind, deaf and stupid - amazing how far he's made it). And on and on it goes - it is standing room only in the rogues' gallery.
But, of course, the book lays bear shocking cultural and institutional failings. I have tremendous respect for UNC as an intellectual operation. In my field, it is full of world-class scholars who are also wonderful human beings. But as an institution, Carolina utterly failed to do its job and utterly failed the students who were "cheated" of the education that the institution should be in the business - the only business - of providing. Speaking in my personal capacity, if the NCAA doesn't throw the book at UNC for violating its most sacred trust - educating its students - then I will seriously question what it is for, and whether its voluminous handbook is a book at all, or maybe just useful for papering things over, so to speak.
Anyway, random notes follow.
read: Taylor Branch, "The Shame of College Sports," Atlantic, 2011.
read: Armstrong & Perry, Scoreboard, Baby
- admissions stage is most crucial, ensure we don't bring in ill-prepared students, lessening perceived need to help too much
- FAR Jack Evans was not minding the store
- academic advisors giving way too much "guidance" - eligibility maintenance the key imperative - constructing schedules, selecting majors, etc. etc.
-156: "intersecting forms of desperation that are integral to the world of big-time college sport" - "66% of all African American males between the ages of 13 and 18 believe they can earn a living playing professional sports" ... desperation of coaches in hyper-competitive environment ... "the recruiting desperation of coaches converges with the desperation of all those dreaming high school athletes to produce an elaborate admissions process that is rife with fraud and faker" (Smith and Willingham 2015, 159).
-175 good example of inappropriate clustering in majors
-228 is there any way to blind the learning specialists to eligibility issues?
-241: "absent a large and uncompromising coalition of tenured faculty, one that crosses institutional boundaries and encompasses all of the big-time schools, reform will never happen from the inside out".
-248 alliance of students and faculty
The money and prestige of big-time athletics corrupts. Getting good people is great, but we have to get the institutions right. To me, that especially means that *faculty* need to play more of a role in governing intercollegiate athletics, in insisting on the primacy of the academic mission, in oversight, in articulating the vision, in policing ourselves and our administrators and our coaches. The book ends by insisting on the centrality of the faculty-student nexus. The most magical aspect of faculty life is the joy of working with young people to help them blaze their own trails. We don't need to explore the world in search of the fountain of youth, we find it right in front of us and all around us, every day. We must relentlessly prioritize our students, from the faculty point of view - not by cutting paths of least resistance for them, which some probably-well-meaning folks like Debbie Crowder and lots of learning specialists did at UNC, but by challenging our students to learn and grow, all while helping them along.
What went wrong at UNC? So, so much.
Lots of individuals engaged in misguided or bad acts. The aforementioned Debbie Crowder (admin in the Africana and Afro-American Studies department at UNC) was almost certainly well-intentioned, sympathetic to lots of students who had been and were being exploited for their physical gifts but insufficiently invested-in in other respects. The chair of that department, Julius Nyang'oro, may well have shared that motivation, but we don't really get any view of him. He comes off as mostly just corrupt, a sports fan in a position to help Carolina athletics and enjoy lots of perks (money, tickets, trips, etc.) in return. Other individual faculty and some departments seem subject to the same assessment. The Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR), the chair of the faculty senate, and lots of deanlets, deans, and higher-ups evince multiple varieties of venality, careerism, cover-your-assism and wilful indifference. Coaches? Let me just say F Mack Brown, F Butch Davis, and F Roy Williams (the man must be blind, deaf and stupid - amazing how far he's made it). And on and on it goes - it is standing room only in the rogues' gallery.
But, of course, the book lays bear shocking cultural and institutional failings. I have tremendous respect for UNC as an intellectual operation. In my field, it is full of world-class scholars who are also wonderful human beings. But as an institution, Carolina utterly failed to do its job and utterly failed the students who were "cheated" of the education that the institution should be in the business - the only business - of providing. Speaking in my personal capacity, if the NCAA doesn't throw the book at UNC for violating its most sacred trust - educating its students - then I will seriously question what it is for, and whether its voluminous handbook is a book at all, or maybe just useful for papering things over, so to speak.
Anyway, random notes follow.
read: Taylor Branch, "The Shame of College Sports," Atlantic, 2011.
read: Armstrong & Perry, Scoreboard, Baby
- admissions stage is most crucial, ensure we don't bring in ill-prepared students, lessening perceived need to help too much
- FAR Jack Evans was not minding the store
- academic advisors giving way too much "guidance" - eligibility maintenance the key imperative - constructing schedules, selecting majors, etc. etc.
-156: "intersecting forms of desperation that are integral to the world of big-time college sport" - "66% of all African American males between the ages of 13 and 18 believe they can earn a living playing professional sports" ... desperation of coaches in hyper-competitive environment ... "the recruiting desperation of coaches converges with the desperation of all those dreaming high school athletes to produce an elaborate admissions process that is rife with fraud and faker" (Smith and Willingham 2015, 159).
-175 good example of inappropriate clustering in majors
-228 is there any way to blind the learning specialists to eligibility issues?
-241: "absent a large and uncompromising coalition of tenured faculty, one that crosses institutional boundaries and encompasses all of the big-time schools, reform will never happen from the inside out".
-248 alliance of students and faculty