Mellick Article not THAT bad...

[DKW 86 7,423]

http://www.al.com/sports/birminghamnews/rm...7360.xml&coll=2

Academic integrity can't be legislated

Saturday, July 15, 2006

In a perfect world, the uproar at Auburn University would be that the school apparently has no problem with a professor offering a class in which very little work was required in order to earn a high grade.

After all, it wasn't just football players who were signing up for Thomas Petee's "directed-reading" sociology classes. If one-fourth of his students were athletes, then three-fourths were not, which means word was getting around about how easy it was to get a good grade from good ol' Dr. Petee.

But this is not a perfect world. So the attention is focused on Auburn football players, who found that taking a Petee class was an easy way to stay one step ahead of the NCAA's eligibility requirements.

From an NCAA perspective, if professor Petee was a soft touch for all students, there's nothing wrong - as long as members of the Auburn athletic department did not have an understanding with Petee that football players would get preferential treatment.

Because for all the intrusions by the NCAA into who can be eligible to participate in college athletics, what it has no control over is the academic integrity of its member institutions.

The NCAA can't make everyone Yale or Stanford. Remember the allegations of major grade-fixing at the University of Tennessee by Linda Bensel-Myers? One of Tennessee's defenses was that the school wasn't doing anything for athletes that it didn't do for the general student body. And guess what? The NCAA can't claim special privilege for athletes if the same privilege was being provided regular students as well.

Do you really think athletic department advisors don't occasionally guide athletes to majors that make it easier to stay eligible, that don't interfere with the real reason athletes are on campus in the first place?

So there were quite a few football players at Auburn taking classes in sociology. Guess what? Go to any media guide at any major football playing institution, and you'll start to see certain areas of study pop up over and over.

There are an awful lot of "human environmental science" majors on the football team at the University of Alabama. "Sports management" is big with the football team at Michigan, as is "communication" at Wake Forest and "residential property management" at Virginia Tech. Barker has a degree in Sports Fitness MGT.

Even at Harvard, a disproportionate number of football players major in economics, which is looked down on as a comparatively easy major.

Is it a coincidence? Or is it that athletic department academic advisors are taking care of the school's investment, making sure athletes take classes that allow them to participate in making millions of dollars for the school?

Practically every school has some kind of academic path of least resistance popular with athletes. And with the NCAA's new emphasis on APR (Academic Performance Rating), expect more such fields of study to exist as schools fight to avoid NCAA penalties.

If Auburn wants to hand out degrees in sociology like toys in a McDonald's Happy Meal, as long as the drive-through window is open to everyone, the NCAA's hands are tied.

But if I had a degree - any degree - from Auburn University, I might be inclined to hide it right now.

The value of every Auburn diploma just went into a major decline.

Ray, at least we had somewhere to fall...

The Huie Article:

Alabama Athletic Academic Tradition:

Cripple Courses are Safest

But back to the brain trust. The big push for us came in September when the freshmen brainless beef rolled in. Here were two hundred huskies who had been "eased through" high school an football and now we had to ease the best of them through college. In registering them we used our marked list of freshman professors. We placed the beef in classes where they would receive "sympathetic treatment" and steered them clear of those old sour apples who still insisted on flunking a guy just because he didn't know anything. But we had other limitations to consider, too. All science courses except the most elementary were out, for they would have long laboratory periods for which no beefer could find time. Courses leading to any form of higher mathematics were impossible. So commerce, law, medicine or any form of engineering were blacklisted from the start. This left us only the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education through which to route the beefers.

Our most successful plan was to enroll the beefer in the School of Education and point him toward a possible bachelor of science degree in physical education. One of the factors which may have caused us to prefer the education school was that Dr. James J. Doster, dean of this school, was a faculty adviser to the athletic department, and was usually selected to represent the faculty on the long football trips.

Accordingly, the typical course with which we loaded down the freshman beefer consisted of classes in Bible, Psychology 1, Astronomy, and Music Appreciation. All were "cripples" of the purest ray. Bible was taught by a lovable old gentleman who delivered lofty lectures and never bothered his sleeping class with details like questions or examinations. I once heard of a beefer about to Runk this course who was given a special examination by the professor. The professor asked him two questions: Who created the world? and How long did it take? The beefer answered only the first question correctly for a grade of fifty, but the kindly professor gave him an additional ten points for having tried the second to bring his grade to the sixty necessary for passing.

Astronomy, Psychology I and Music Appreciation were all taught by "fellowship" students and not by regular professors, so we had little difficulty here.

After registering the frosh we turned to the progressively harder task of making class schedules for the Red Shirts, the varsity and the postgrads. After all, you do eventually run out of "crip" courses and hit a bottleneck guarded by some unfriendly prof.

The Red Shirts composed the "suspension" squad. They were the fifty or more prospects who had already served their time on the freshman squad but had not yet been chosen for the varsity. You see, under the five-year eligibility rule in the Southeastern Conference a boy can play a year on the freshman squad, a year on some intermediate squad, and still play out his full three-year varsity career. Thus in the spring the coaches look over the varsity and see what is needed to fill the holes resulting from what the sports writers politely call "graduation." They look over the Red Shirts first since they are older and better developed. Then they pick up a few from the freshman squad. Next they consign the rest of the freshmen to the Red Shirt pool to grow and develop another year. The chaff portion of the Red Shirt squad is then fired off the pay roll, and the brain trust promptly allows them to flunk and fall out of school. This fate will already have caught up with more than a hundred freshmen before the end of the first semester.

Thus, because of the Red Shirt pool, it often develops that a Tide "sophomore sensation" is some lad who has already had four years of training under the Alabama coaching staff-two years at Tuscaloosa High School, a year with the frosh, and a year with the Red Shirts.

When you understand this, you can perhaps more easily understand how the great senior squad of '30 could score twenty-one points on Washington State in eight minutes, and how the next great senior squad of '33 could score twenty- four points on Stanford in six minutes. Flash Suther, the halfback star of the '30 game, had been playing under the Alabama coaching staff for eight years, and Hillman Holley, the sophomore sensation of the same game, had had five years, counting their years at Tuscaloosa High. Captain Foots Clements and others of the same team came from the Arkansas farms which have produced fellows like Don Hutson, Sandy Sanford and the Moseleys.

The squad of '37 lost to California when Thomas gambled with a sophomore tailback-Herky Moseley who had only had two years on one of the junior-college farms in Arkansas. But the team had reached the Bowl only because of two last-minute field goals from Sandy Sanford's $100,000 toe. And since Sanford was from the same farm as Moseley, the farm's record did not suffer.

Here's another tip. Watch the '41 edition go back to the Rose Bowl. Another great senior squad is in the making, and the sophomore sensations will be Don Hutson's twin brothers. Imagine, if you can, twin Hutsons on the same field, one throwing and the other receiving passes.

Great Heroes Deserve Degrees

But back to classes again. After we had found all the "crip" courses we could for the Red Shirts and the varsity men, we turned to our problem children. These were the postgrads.

This squad was composed exclusively of Great Heroes-the fellows who had played out all their years of eligibility and now had returned from the wars to rest on their laurels while we poor brain trusters sweated to get them some kind of degree. Hank Crisp, it seems, has a sense of honor. He doesn't mind firing off the inept by the hundreds, but when a guy has fought and bled for the alma mater for five or ten years, he not only deserves an all-something-or-other but he also deserves a college degree. And Crisp was one to see that he got it. Or rather Crisp was one to see that I saw that he got it.

We called these great heroes the postgrad squad for two reasons. First, because the sports writers had already mournfully announced the Tide was losing them through "graduation," and second, there was the morale to think of, as Dr. Goebbels might say. After all, when a worshipful freshman got inquisitive at the frat house, these great heroes had to have some explanation for their continued presence around the campus.

"Oh, I'm hanging around doing a little postgrad work," they would remark loftily.

They couldn't afford to tell the frosh they still hadn't passed freshman English. It would have been bad for the morale.

For the most part these postgrads were the fellows who abused the privilege of being dumb. The most affable, probably without degrees, would have already left the campus to sell bonds or insurance. Those who had been given degrees would be teaching and coaching in high schools and developing new prospects for the machine.

I could give you many amusing stories of my labors with these boys. From the day they had left elementary school they had been passed through their classes because of football. Consequently, they had the formal education of the average kid in the sixth grade. Algebra was a required subject for a degree at Alabama. Can you picture one of these big fellows trying to solve the simplest algebraic equation? Or scanning a line from Browning? There was usually nothing for me to do but find the right prof and make a deal.

I remember in particular one great hero who was an All-America guard. He had been on the campus for seven years, and we had labored and dragged him through everything but elementary English. I would sit and read to him and point out and define the various parts of speech. "Here, Spike," I would say, "is a noun. And here is a verb."

He would nod his head, and I would read on. After six lines I would point back to the two words and ask him what they were. He would give me a blank stare, and the session would be ended.

I got Spike his pass in English, however, and the night he marched up and received his degree his professor and I sat in Tuscaloosa's most respectable bar and drank a toast to the great American system of public education.

A Triumph for Education

The classic story of the Alabama campus is the one about the football player in the history class. Having failed all his exams, the professor consented to give him one last special exam.

"I'm going to give you one question," he said. "If you can answer it, I will pass you. The question is: What is the capital of Alabama?"

The beefer studied for a long moment and answered: "Wetumpka."

"All right," replied the professor. "Had you answered 'Montgomery, your grade would have been 100. Since Wetumpka is 18 miles from Montgomery, I'll subtract 18 from 100 and your grade will be 82 for the course. I congratulate you.

[tombigbeetiger 223]

melick is a tool....he is one of the most unimportant men in this state but you could not convince him of that