The Kept-Up Academic Librarian

Coaches Can Be Endowed Just Like Professors

Seven of the Ivy League’s eight football coaching jobs are endowed, along with numerous positions in other sports. The premise is that these coaches are also teachers, part of the academic fabric of their institutions. Endowments in athletics are similar to those in academics. The donation is invested, and a portion of the return is distributed each year.Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/sports/ncaafootball/endowments-becoming-common-for-football-coaching-jobs.html?_r=2&ref=education

UNC Report Calls For Review Of Athletics In Wake Of Academic Fraud Scandal

A report by a special faculty committee looking into the academic fraud scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill found an athletics program divorced from the faculty, academic counselors for athletes improperly helping them enroll in classes and poor oversight of faculty administrators who have wide latitude in running their departments. The three professors who wrote the report called for an independent commission of outside experts in higher education to review athletics and academics at the university. The report comes after a university probe found 54 courses within the Department of African and Afro-American Studies that had little or no instruction, and dozens of independent study classes that had little evidence of academic rigor. The classes were largely filled with athletes. Read more at:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/07/26/2223477/unc-chapel-hill-faculty-calls.html 

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/07/26/2223477/unc-chapel-hill-faculty-calls.html#storylink=cpy

 

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/07/26/2223477/unc-chapel-hill-faculty-calls.html#storylink=cpy

 

Cuts To College Sports Could Hurt America's Olympic Potential

Olympic sports have become an endangered species at many major universities, where athletic departments are dropping varsity teams to remedy deficits and invest more heavily in the revenue-generating sports of football and men's basketball. This retreat from higher education's traditional model of offering a broad array of sports stands to undercut the nation's Olympic prospects in the future. Read more at:
http://www.newsleader.com/article/20120604/SPORTS/206040318 

 

 

Student Loyalty Programs Help Boost Attendance At Campus Sports Events

The University of Michigan Athletic Department is in the beginning stages of developing a student loyalty program. Loyalty programs are designed to boost attendance at athletic events by offering students incentives —usually in the form of priority seating at football and basketball games— to go to games early or attend low-traffic events. Some models encourage students to show up to games early so the student section isn't sparse. Read more at:
http://www.annarbor.com/news/university-of-michigan-athletics-is/

As Cheerleading Tries To Transition Into A College Sport One University Drops It

There’s no doubt these women are athletes. They form towering human pyramids with flipping dismounts. They perform jaw-dropping tumbling passes, with multiple acrobats reeling off synchronized back handsprings and back flips with uncanny precision. But it’s evident the sport still struggles with its identity. There are now two sports derived from cheerleading — acrobatics and tumbling (the branch Maryland started) and stunt (backed by USA Cheer) — seeking the NCAA’s endorsement. It’s unclear whether either will succeed. But should cheerleading by any name blossom into a major college sport, Maryland, a onetime pioneer, will watch from the sidelines. Read more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/title-ix-anniversary-maryland-cuts-cheerleading-but-was-it-ever-a-sport/2012/04/13/gIQA5EkRFT_story_2.html

Testing Whether March Madness Success Translates To A Better University

Sports boosters are fond of saying that success in intercollegiate sports programs benefits aspiring colleges and universities by raising the profile of the schools, which, in turn, increases the number of students who apply and the funding available to support high-quality academic programs. As a result, the boosters say, schools can select higher quality students and can hire better faculty. As we approach the peak of “March Madness,” we thought it would be interesting to see if the tournament results to date provide evidence to support the conjectures about expenditures, athletic success and institutional quality. Read more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/does-march-madness-success-boost-collegiate-rankings/2012/03/31/gIQA0LOEnS_blog.html?wprss=rss_college-inc%3f

New Services Help Colleges Monitor Their Athletes' Tweets

The business plan of Varsity Monitor is simple. Major universities like North Carolina, Nebraska and Oklahoma pay $7,000 to $10,000 a year and Varsity Monitor keeps an online eye on their athletes. Among the services the company and others like it provide is a computer application that searches social media sites that athletes frequent, looking for obscenities, offensive commentary or words like “free,” which could indicate that a player has accepted a gift in violation of N.C.A.A. rules. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/sports/universities-track-athletes-online-raising-legal-concerns.html?ref=technology

More Colleges Are Naming Their Basketball Courts

The naming of courts, if to some a curiosity, has been going on for a while. U.C.L.A. has played on Nell & John Wooden Court in Pauley Pavilion since 2003. Duke namedCoach K Court at Cameron Indoor Stadium in honor of Mike Krzyzewski in 2000. But the last few years have seen an increase in court dedications at the major college level, many of which have been controversial. Naming the floor after one coach sometimes undercuts the legacy of another, and as is often the case in college athletics, honor usually comes with a price tag. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/sports/ncaabasketball/when-colleges-dedicate-courts-squabbles-often-follow.html?src=recg

College Coach Gets Paid Little And Loses Most Of The Time

In the middle of his 40th year as the men’s basketball coach atYeshiva University, Jonathan Halpert, normally quick with a wisecrack, could not joke his way past the truth: his team was playing poorly. The challenges of coaching at a university like Yeshiva are nothing new to the 67-year-old Halpert, currently the longest-serving basketball coach in New York City.  He tells his players that learning is what matters most, whether it comes from classes or his motion offense. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/sports/ncaabasketball/for-yeshiva-basketball-coach-its-all-about-the-journey.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Now Your Chess Team Is Our Chess Team

Imagine if a university without a basketball program recruitedMike Krzyzewski, the legendary coach at Duke University, and not only managed to hire him but also persuaded most of his team to switch with him. In essence, that is what Webster University in St. Louis has done by hiring Susan Polgar, the head of the Texas Tech chess program. Now Ms. Polgar and her husband, Paul Truong, the manager of the chess team, are leaving Texas Tech, and are heading to Webster, a university mostly geared toward postgraduate students around the world. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/crosswords/chess/chess-coach-to-leave-texas-tech-with-teams-best-in-tow.html