Q: How big a part of your campus life is sports? Is your school more well known for its football or basketball team than for turning out Social scientists or Lit profs? Does the athletic department, coaches, athletes, etc. ever play a role in your day to day life as a professor?
-Arthur from Allendale
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-Arthur from Allendale
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From the moderator: In response to some questions about submitted Big Thirstys, I do not keep unused questions for future installments. If your question does not appear and you'd like me to consider it again, please resend it.
My school has truly extracurricular sports as well. Nobody's going to the Olympics or to the pros.
ReplyDeleteStudents still drop classes or screw up their schedule so that they can attend their practices. Their goal at college is to play a sport that provides them no employable skills. It's like they major in the humanities. (HA! I kid.)
This situation makes me even more frustrated than if we had a big time sports program. At least atheletes at a top 25 school have a decent shot at the NFL.
Pretty much what BB said, though we have had one football player play in the NFL (in the entire history of the school).
ReplyDeleteThat said, the athletic department is very supportive of the academic mission of the college, at least to our faces. We - and the athletic department - don't allow kids to miss their classes or labs for practices, though in principle they could miss labs for games. Typically, though, they don't; we find some other arrangement.
Curiously, my undergraduate alma mater and one of my adjunct appointments take very different attitudes at being Division III schools.
ReplyDeleteMy undergrad athletic program was truly "intermurals plus". However, the adjunct school seems to believe Division III is just scintilla from the Big 10. They have dedicated and well appointed facilities. The local community follows the teams.
(Though to be fair, I went to college within driving distance of a major market city with a major league team for every sport. I now live half-a-day's drive from a pro-sport city.)
Still, my adjunct school does not let athletics rule. Several coaches have called players on the carpet for trying to use their sport as an excuse for missing assignments/exams.
I teach at a Second String State and at a Big State U.
ReplyDeleteI have very few athletes in my 3S classes, and the ones I do have are not in "Big Money" sports. I have very little concept of how sports actually affects their day-to-day life as students and they usually do fine in class (B/B+) with some forays into the A range...for some reason track kids seem to be really good students. 3S is a D-1 school, but it's also a small school...I think that makes it D-1AA or something. It means that football (especially) is important, but again, I never see the football kids and my understanding is that there's a bit better balance between athletics and academics than at Big State.
At BSU, it's a uniform of a different color. 'Revenue sports' -- men's basketball and football -- are huge. Athletes in many sports receive special saily tutoring. We (as faculty) as asked to issue periodic reports on the students' progress. Sometimes the students have 'minders' who come to class WITH the students to make sure that they are actually attending class. (This freaked me out the first time it happened.) Their schedules are crazy...I've had kids who have practices that start at 5am and who are up until 11pm in required study halls during the regular season. Some of them are genuinely nice guys. Some are very bright, and some are really struggling to do work that they are scholastically unprepared for. Some faithfully come to class, and some skip a lot...I had one young man in class who I literally saw more often on TV than I did in my classroom. (Apparently I should have saved some of his paperwork, he's now in the NBA and his signature is worth money.)
Once in a while I experience pressure from an athlete or a coach not to change a grade, but to offer an athlete something special...extra credit, a chance to retake an exam....in order to help them bring up their grade. I say no, and that is the stated policy of our university, but...they still ask.
Somebody recently wrote a book that compared D-1 schools to plantations where mostly white audiences gather to watch mostly black teams perform acts of physical prowess. Since I teach in the South...well...let's say the comparison wasn't news to me. I feel terrible for the students themselves, and I actually feel very peculiar watching the games sometimes because I genuinely believe the coaching staff at my university is making serious bank on the backs of our players...I recently heard an NPR article about how revenue sports actually don't bring in that much revenue, but I haven't had time to research those numbers for Big State. I do know that our coaches make a staggering amount of money, and I'd argue that it's partially at the expense of the health and education of their players.
*I mean special daily tutoring, sorry, not enough coffee.
ReplyDeleteMy undergraduate institution was Div III, and--confession time--I was an athlete on a team that won two NCAA titles in my time there. But beyond the occasional mention that our school was one of the winningest Div III programs ever, sports played no particular role on campus. It was, and is, a school for math and science geeks. I also graduated with 3.92 average. Several of my former teammates have PhDs in things like chemistry, math, and physics. Oh yeah, I went to grad school with a guy who played football at one of the "legendary" programs. He holds a named chair in his field. All this to say, that being a serious college athlete is not a disability.
ReplyDeleteI used to teach at a major conference football factory. Sports were important to the school's identity, but I didn't feel like they interfered with academics. I flunked a current NFL All-Pro and didn't get any flack for it from the school. The coach invited me to coffee, but never asked me to change the grade. Another former NFL player was one of my very best students. Again, being an athlete need not be a disability, but I know from friends at similar schools that it is sometimes treated as one.
My current institution, a pretty crappy Div III program, couldn't give two shits about sports. If it weren't for the progress forms I get from the athletics department, I wouldn't even know which kids were athletes.
My only other observation is that in my experience at the Div I level (in grad school and as a TT proffie) the female athletes are perfectly good and serious students (again, some of the vey best I've had) as are the male athletes in the smaller sports. The corrupting influence, it seems to me, comes from the existence of the two big professional leagues for which college acts as a minor league system. Even if you are aware, as many of them are, that they will never play a down in the NFL or wave a towel at the end of an NBA bench, the fact that many of the other members of the team might forces all of them to treat their participation in sports as if they really were auditioning for the show.
Anyway, I do get tired of the way that athletics gets maligned. Athletes are like most of our other students. Some of them want to put in the time to get As in very difficult classes. Others want to play a lot of Halo 3 in their downtime. If I were king for a day, I'd either force the NBA and NFL to subsidize every Div I program, which would be fair given that they are de facto minor leagues, or I would simply abolish those sports until such a time as those two leagues set up viable minor league systems of their own.
As far as I can tell, it's really only the student athletes who care about sports on my campus. Even then, I rarely hear about those sports from even the students who play them. But that seems to be pretty typical for universities in my country. Frankly, the emphasis on college sports at US institutions looks rather ludicrous to those of us from elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteMy undergraduate institution was an engineering school so, you know. We had a varsity football team, but as we were in New England, the club hockey team were the real stars.
ReplyDeleteMy doctorate is from Penn State.
Here at Harvard South, we are Division III, but the Athletics Department seems to think we're about to go big time and wants us to place sports above all else. I've had assistant coaches try to strong arm me into doing all sorts of favors for their little darlings, but I just look them in the eye and point out that this place is small potatoes compared to other places I've been. I'll probably have to stop doing that for a while, eh?
There are only a couple of sports at my school, both of the basketball variety. Once upon a time, there were more, but budget cuts, etc.
ReplyDeleteThere has been a huge difference in the attitudes between male and female athletes, due to the attitudes of their respective coaches. After my first year spent informing male athletes that sitting in the back of class and reading newspapers didn't count for participation points, I ceased having male athletes enroll in my class. Interestingly, I almost always have every member of the women's team in at least one class each year, and they are nearly always the top students.
Guess which team goes on to post-season play each year?
I only have three experiances...
ReplyDeleteAn Ivy that is even bad for an ivy in the sports that count to me. No student in crew or polo has asked me for special considertion. But all the little darlings are special with or without sports.
A respectable second string state school with a mix of levels sports but none that big time. As far as I could tell the players were good students and well rounded.
A sports powerhouse in one of the revenue sports where I routinely saw female athletes on national championship teams. I never saw the men from the big team in classes, and only once saw one of them on campus at all, I always wondered if they really went to class...
On the other hand, as crazy as that sports culture could be I couldn't see the student population rioting in support of coaches who enabled child sex abuse.
My current institution of higher larnin' isn't much of a sports-oriented place. We're in the process of maybe starting up a football program and have some good existing teams, or so I understand, but sports don't have much impact on campus or on my work as a prof, other than my being asked to fill out grade reports every now and then. The athletes I've had in class are fair-to-middlin' students, and I've no complaints about any of them.
ReplyDeleteMy grad school, on the other hand, was a big-ass sports mecca. We had a Very Famous Name as a basketball coach, another Very Famous Name as a football coach, massive shrines to The Orange Orb and The Almighty Ovoid that hold 15K and 60K people respectively, and shitty parking that meant we couldn't access our academic buildings on game days. Other than the inconvenience, though, I never had much problem with the athletics programs; the football players who didn't flee in terror from my classes were mostly dopey but respectful, and the female soccer star who text-messaged her way through Hamster Fur Weaving got a stern talking-to from her coach and started to pay attention in class.
Ironically, the most trouble with athletes that I ever had came at the STEM-focused university where I adjuncted for a few years. Most of the basketball team ended up in my sections of Hamster Fur Weaving, but very few of them actually belonged at this nerd-tacular institution. The select few were good students, while a goodly handful failed outright and the vast majority barely scraped C-minuses. Not a one of them had a STEM-related major.
My school does fairly well at the junior college / community college level. This semester all of my student athletes have had me sign off on grades/attendance/participation every week or so, and have been proactive in letting me know about planned absences and how they plan to do the work *before* it is due.
ReplyDeleteI know, right.
They all have A's at this point.