In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 9 The StudentAthlete Several years ago, the Michigan athletic department started an important tradition by hosting a banquet each spring to honor those athletes who had distinguished themselves in the classroom. It was my privilege as president to attend this banquet and offer congratulations to these students, all of whom had earned honors status in their various academic programs . It was gratifying to see many of our top athletes in attendance . In fact, some teams such as gymnastics and swimming sent a very high proportion of their athletes to the academic honors banquet. At each banquet, the university would also honor alumni who had been distinguished in both athletic and professional careers in order to make the point that the combination of outstanding athletic and academic performance would serve the student -athletes well later in life. The academic honors event underscores the most important rationale for intercollegiate athletics: the belief that athletic competition can and should play an important role in the university’s central mission of education. While the values learned in athletic competition are decidedly different from those learned in the classroom , they are no less important. Values of character, such as dedication , sacrifice, teamwork, integrity, and leadership can be learned on the field, both from coaches dedicated to their teaching roles and from the experience of athletic competition itself. It is clear that college sports have the capacity to provide students with important opportunities to develop these qualities so essential in later life. Of course it takes great dedication and commitment to balance the demands of intercollegiate athletics with the demands of a col189 lege education. Excelling in academics is challenging enough without the additional pressures of participating in highly competitive athletics programs. Yet those student-athletes who manage to keep an appropriate balance between their athletic activities and their academic objectives have the opportunity for an extraordinary education, in the most complete sense of the word. It has sometimes been said that the purpose of a college education is to learn the art of life. If this is the objective, then our student-athletes may have a certain edge, since most of them benefit from a full range of experiences on our campus—from the intellectual, to the athletic, to the cultural. The value of athletics, when combined with commitment to receiving a quality college education, becomes all the more apparent when meeting former Michigan student -athletes who have gone on to great success—indeed leadership —in their careers as teachers, executives, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and even as president of the United States. Yet there are two teams that are always underrepresented at our academic honors events: football and basketball. To be sure, a few outstanding student-athletes from these sports always attend, but they are clearly the exception. Football and basketball are not holding their own when it comes to student academic honors. 190 • INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY Retiring the Michigan football jersey number of President Gerald R. Ford. (UM Photo Services.) Here again, the story of college sports breaks into two separate chapters. In the majority of sports programs, athletes are students first and athletes second. They achieve academic honors just as frequently as other undergraduates do. However, football and basketball are different. These sports have developed cultures with low expectations for academic performance. For many student-athletes in these sports, athletics are clearly regarded as a higher priority than their academic goals. Hence, to discuss athletics and academics , we are obliged once again to focus on where the problems really exist: in football and basketball. In this chapter, we will focus on the concept of the studentathlete and the relationship between athletics and academics. At the outset we should acknowledge that, like much of the rest of college sports, this subject is shrouded in myths and misperceptions . Even the name used throughout this book to describe the participants in college sports, student-athlete, is contrived. In a creative public relations move designed to thwart efforts in the 1950s to make college athletes eligible for workman’s compensation , the director of the NCAA, Walter Byers, decreed that all future NCAA publications would refer to college athletes as “student athletes .”1 This, along with the oxymoron athletic scholarship, was designed to prop up the myth that college football was an amateur activity designed for student benefit. The strategy worked; athletes were viewed as students and not as employees; and the term student -athlete has been used ever since. We begin by discussing...

Share