This article from Inside Higher Ed titled, NCAA Finds Southern Mississippi Basketball Staff Committed Academic Fraud, discusses a very serious issue that higher education faces with Division 1 institutions. “Division 1” is the highest level of intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Unfortunately, academic dishonesty is not foreign to higher education. I often hear stories about students getting into prestigious colleges because they simply cheated their way through high school. With this case, however, it’s not just the students being dishonest. Division 1 universities are where they are clearly because they strive to be the best of the best, but former coach of Southern Mississippi, Donnie Tyndall, went about achieving that the wrong way. Tyndall had his eyes on select students at two year institutions and did what he could to get them on his team. He and his basketball staff completed over 100 assignments in online classes for future recruits that needed academic help to transfer to Southern Mississippi. This scandal wasn’t limited to just those who needed academic help. Tyndall even went as far to recruit those who needed financial help. He went to a pharmacy, purchased 4 prepaid $500 credit cards and had his graduate students use them to pay for a recruits online classes and registration fees.
I was absolutely shocked reading this article. I never really understood the pressures education institutions face when it comes to athletics until I learned that there are coaches who are willing to commit academic fraud to deal with them. Thankfully for the past two years, the NCAA has been working on this issue and investigating Division 1 institutions for any other cases of academic fraud. The NCAA definitely has to be more aggressive in exposing the corrupt ways of college athletics.
Link to Article: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/11/ncaa-finds-southern-mississippi-basketball-staff-committed-academic-fraud
Marielle, I completely agree with you. No institution should sacrifice the education of their students just to advance their athletic programs it simply isn’t worth it. Unfortunately, this practice has been going on for years, so quite honestly, I’m not surprised by this article.
These practices have become so commonplace that shows and movies have started making fun of it and/or addressing it. The show “Blue Mountain State” is about the country’s top football team (which has been made up and is completely fictitious). None of the players on the team were studying or going to class or anything like that. They were each given “a nerd,” the show’s words not mine, to do all their work for them. When an investigation was conducted on the team about their academics, the teachers interviewed claimed to have never seen any of the students on the team. This may seem far-fetched, but it actually happens.
One of my teachers from high school has a friend who is a professor at a school that is Division 1 (the name escapes me but I believe it’s UNC). This professor had a student in the class that was on the wrestling team but never came to class, well he came to the first one to collect his syllabus. He never handed in work and wasn’t even there, so the teacher failed him for the course, rightly so. A coach or the wrestling team approached the professor and asked to have the grade changed, but he refused. At the end of the semester, the professor looked at the student’s grade and saw that the F had been changed to a C. This is just one example.
The corruption with student-athletes is nothing new. It’s a shame that it has become a part of higher education at all. I’m glad, though, that the NCAA has been cracking down on these cases though, and these investigations should be extended to Division 2 and 3 schools. Academic fraud may help the college or university’s athletics program, but it is hurting the students in the end.
I agree with your post. There have oftentimes been this misconception that athletics are more significant than the education itself. There have been so many stories that I’ve heard of in the past, or even just saw on television shows on TV, where coaches push their athletes to cheat in order to be cleared to play that season or for an upcoming game. In schools where sports really are central, there have been cases where the professors have even let unsatisfactory schoolwork, by athletes, slide. I think that it something that we can look into changing in the higher education. As we’ve spoken about in class, some people may not be suited for college. Some should go to crafts school, while others don’t need anything further than high school. The fact that professional athletes are scouted through colleges, forces those that may not be academically capable of success (but are athletically triumphant) to have to find a way to get through school in order to be able to do what they are good at. We should look at separating the educational and athletic fields, in order to prevent such blurred lines between what should be prioritized in a given institution.
You beat me to this topic. I will be assigning some readings about the whole question of NCAA and college sports today for next week. So you’ll already know about some of this. Very few students who are high caliber athletes actually get to the professional leagues, though some do. It’s like higher education has decided to fund farm team for the NBA and NFL and possibly the NHL.