Voici un article du Pope Center sur le sujet de reference...
"An Athletic DilemmaThe biggest games in college sports aren’t always played on the field.
By Jay SchalinCommentsJanuary 05, 2009
It’s
an ages-old question—one as old as the athletic scholarship itself: are
college athletes on scholarship primarily students, bound by the same
rules and driven by the same motivations as their classmates? Or are
they more like hired mercenaries, brought in to do a specific job of
great value to the university, and students second—or perhaps not at
all?
Universities will surely claim that athletes are indeed
students first, but their behavior often suggests otherwise. The failure
to make the distinction clear, and to act accordingly, hurts higher
education’s credibility.
Two recent newspaper investigations
indicate that, in the two major revenue-producing sports of men’s
basketball and football, the classroom is not the players’ strong suit.
The evidence presented by the
Atlanta Constitution-Journal (Dec. 27, 2008), concerning SAT scores and graduation rates, combined with
a November USA Today article about student-athletes’ choices of majors, suggests that many of the
nation’s universities are complicit in a system that is basically
unethical—students are admitted with credentials that do not even begin
to approach the standards of other students, they are directed toward
meaningless courses, and they either do not graduate or they receive
degrees with little value.
The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution report compared SAT scores of regular students, all athletes, and
athletes in men’s basketball and football at 54 of the most athletically
competitive major public colleges. The newspaper found that
“nationwide, football players average 220 points lower on the SAT than
their classmates — and men’s basketball players average seven points
less than football players.” Other male athletes had, on average, SATs
that were 115 higher than those of football players, and female athletes
averaged scored 147 points more.
The two schools that will
play for the national football championship on January 8 demonstrate
that winning comes with a willingness to lower standards. At the
University of Florida, entering freshmen for the 2001-02 school year
averaged a combined 1236 on their math and reading SAT scores (out of a
maximum of 1600). Entering football players, however, averaged 890. At
the University of Oklahoma, the numbers were 1158 and 920.
The
same article also stated that while all athletes have a higher
graduation rate than all students (66 percent to 64 percent within a
six-year period), football players graduate only 56 percent of the time,
and male basketball players graduate at a dismal 49 percent rate.
The
USA Today article in November revealed that the recruiting policies are just the
beginning. Scholarship athletes tend to choose their college majors so
that they get the best grades for the least work—they “major in
eligibility.” This is not a new phenomenon for athletes. At a recent
Pope Center conference on athletics in higher education, Bill
Thierfelder, the president of Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, North
Carolina, used the exact same phrase to describe his academic career at
the University of Maryland in the early 1970s, when he was the national
high jump champion. He said that he, too, “majored in eligibility.”
USA Today looked at 142 Division I schools and found that athletes tend to
“cluster” with their teammates in easy majors, often in the social
sciences, that offer little value after graduation. The article
suggested this is hardly a coincidence: it quoted one former Kansas
State University football player as saying “the athletics academics
advisors said ‘this is what everybody is doing. It’s the easiest
major.’”
A former Boise State University football player
said, “You hear which majors, and which classes, are the easiest and you
take them. You’re going to school so you can stay in sports. You’re not
going for a degree…It’s a joke.”
The
Journal-Constitution quoted Murray Sperber, a former University of Indiana professor and the
author of several books on college sports. He said “there’s a huge
world of Mickey Mouse courses and special curriculums that athletes are
steered into. The problem is there are many athletes graduating from
schools who are semiliterate.”
In one outrageous example, in
2004, an assistant men’s basketball coach (also the son of the head
coach) at the University of Georgia taught a course taken by many
players called “Coaching Principles and Strategy of Basketball.” The
final exam consisted of questions such as: “How many goals are on a
basketball court? How many points does a 3-point field goal account for
in a basketball game? Diagram the half-court line.”
Most
programs avoid demonstrating such open contempt for academics, but the
whole system seems to work on a giant collaborative wink—as if
administrators were saying in unison: “they (the athletes) aren’t
qualified to succeed academically at our school, but we pretend to teach
them, they pretend to learn, and we don’t have to pay them much. And
they give us the publicity we crave.”
It was once believed that
money was driving the system, but the work of Sperber and others has
revealed that few athletic programs actually make money.
At the
November Pope Center conference,
participants cited some other basic reasons why universities are
willing to overlook the ethical dilemmas posed by big-time sports. One
is that such athletic events intrinsically get spectators to pick a
side, and since students naturally side with their own school, sports
rapidly form a bond of allegiance among the former strangers who are new
to the school.
But perhaps the main reason why administrators
are willing to sacrifice their school’s integrity is that athletic
teams have great “marketing value” for schools seeking teenage
applicants, according to Harry Lewis, a former dean of the Harvard
University undergraduate college.
Major reform from the
governing body of major college sports, the NCAA (National Collegiate
Athletic Association), is unlikely, since it is subject to the wishes of
its funding members—the colleges themselves. It has attempted to
establish standards for minimum SATs. However, the original standard of
700 points (which was changed to 820 because of changes to the tests)
was attacked for a long time by detractors who said it was too high and
unfairly excluded black athletes who came from inadequate high schools.
In response to this criticism, the NCAA moved to a sliding scale, where
weak SAT scores can be offset by high grades. For instance, an athlete
with a 2.5 grade point average (GPA) in high school must get 820 SATs,
but if he has a 3.0 GPA, he only needs a 620 test score.
Most
college athletes far exceed these standards. The majority are not on
full scholarship, but play for the love of the sport and of competition.
And even the most heralded football and basketball teams include actual
scholar-athletes, sometimes with credentials as good or better than the
rest of the student body. There are also young men and women from
disadvantaged backgrounds who take advantage of the opportunity to study
at a school they would not ordinarily be able to attend.
To
focus on such successes, however, is to deny the existence of the
problem—many athletes simply do not belong on their campuses. Much of
their learning is at the remedial level—a situation that should not be
part of a flagship state university or a prestigious private school.
Some athletes who could do well academically are funneled into similar
levels of mediocrity, in order to concentrate their time and effort on
their sport.
These athletes have a curious life—as “pretend”
students, they are, at the same time, pampered and admired for their
athletic abilities, yet secretly condemned and belittled for their lack
of academic prowess. They know they can’t (or won’t) compete in the
classroom, and the rest of the university community knows it, and that
sets them apart.
And their presence is not always benign.
Their stay is at the expense of other students, who subsidize the
athletic program with higher tuition, or of taxpayers. The gaming that
goes on to ensure their admission and eligibility is a corrupting
influence, and they can detract from the intellectual atmosphere of the
campus. They are also physically imposing, aggressive, and sometimes
antagonistic to the general student population. In one case of an
athletic program run amok, between 1997 and 2004, nine women at the
University of Colorado filed charges sexual assault charges against
football players and recruits.
Still, despite the obvious
problems, a lot of people, many influential, prefer things just the way
they are: administrators, sports fans, (some) students and alumni, local
boosters, politicians and so on. More schools are trying to get on the
big-time sports bandwagon. Here in North Carolina, N.C. Central
University left its Divison II conference of historically black colleges
in 2007 to join the big-time in Division I. UNC-Charlotte recently
chose to begin the process of developing a football team for the first
time—one that will also compete in Division I.
At the Pope Center conference, different paths to reform were proposed. Thierfelder discussed
his national campaign to convince each coach, each administrator and each athlete, one at a
time if necessary, that athletics serves a higher purpose than winning
and money. Sperber countered that the college athletics system must
confronted and combated. Others held out hope that economic pressures
will reduce the focus on college sports in general.
Another
alternative is to “spin-off” the major athletic teams, in much the way
that professors are able to “spin-off” their research with profit
potential from university-owned laboratories into private companies. The
teams could retain the “university brand,” keeping the allegiance of
students and alumni, but be separate, profit-seeking entities that can
serve the interests of all constituencies better. Schools could still
get the publicity they desire without compromising admissions and
academic standards. Athletes, if they so chose, could be paid as the
revenue-producing individuals they are, in line with other second-tier
professional sports. There could also be an agreement to educate willing
athletes who are ready for the rigors of college study.
Yet
no reform will occur until a majority of the university administrations
agree they need to change. Until then, schools are going to submit to
the pressure to field competitive teams for the sake of publicity and
recognition, even as it compromises the integrity of their mission."
Un prochain article suivra dans les jours prochains...
J'aimerais simplement indique que le probleme aux USA n'est pas le sport professionnel, mais le sport "amateur" qui promet en echange des performances sportives de ses "etudiants" un diplome de qualite garantissant un "avenir professionnel" (au sens de profession et non pas de carriere dans la NBA ou la NFL). Cette promesse est rarement tenue dans les grosses ecuries dont je parle plus haut... Mais les coaches qui recrutent les jeunes de quartiers defavorises (dont les parents sont "plus que pauvres"), eux, sont multi millionnaires... Les recrues, en general, au bout de quatre ans "d'etudes" n'ont rien... Pas de diplome qui permette d'obtenir un emploi, pas de carriere professionnelle, rien...
Je decouvre par vos commentaires que le sport professionnel en Europe est coupable egalement... Mais au moins les clubs ne se presentent pas comme des universites qui promettent une formation...
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