ATHLETES AND ACADEMICS : ‘Complacent Faculty’ Blamed by UNLV Researchers Who See Persistent Classroom Abuses

LAS VEGAS —  Academic abuses persist in the athletic programs of colleges and universities that play big-time sports because faculty members do not care enough to correct the problems, two psychology professors at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, have concluded.

“If college athletics remain unchanged, the fault will not lie with ‘evil coaches’ and ‘wicked administrators,’ but with complacent and compliant faculty,” professors Terry J. Knapp and Joseph F. Raney have written in an article prepared for publication in the journal Arena Review, which publishes scholarly articles about sports and society.

In several studies, the two psychologists have reported that UNLV basketball and football players, and to a lesser extent baseball players, flock to easy courses and majors, earn a disproportionate share of their academic credits in physical education courses and are frequently eligible to play only because of high grades in those and other easy classes.

Although Knapp and Raney confined their research to UNLV athletes, discussions with colleagues at other campuses have led them to believe that the problem exists at almost every school that plays big-time basketball or football. Seldom, however, has the problem been studied with the detail Knapp and Raney have provided for the last five years at UNLV.

In their Arena Review article, the two professors say faculty members have done little to correct these abuses. “To date, our greatest disappointment is how little the faculty at UNLV has been influenced by the data,” Knapp and Raney wrote.

‘Don’t Want to Think’

In a recent interview on the Las Vegas campus, Knapp said: “It’s not in the interest of anyone to pursue these things . . . not the coaches or the athletic department or the administration, above all not the faculty--they just don’t want to think about it.”

Some administrators and faculty leaders deny the accusations. They said that Nevada Las Vegas has strengthened its academic advising for athletes in recent years and that departments suspected of easy grading for athletes are being watched closely. They also say high-profile athletes are beginning to graduate in larger numbers.

If the university has tightened academic requirements for athletes, Knapp asked, what accounts for what he described as a recent “series of embarrassments” the athletic program has suffered? These include:

- Football coach Harvey Hyde was fired in April, 1986, after a flurry of arrests of UNLV football players on charges of assault, burglary, purse-snatching and other crimes.

- Varsity basketball players earned up to six academic credits for a social work course they took while on a 16-day, nine-game tour of the South Pacific last summer. The course was known officially as Contemporary Issues in Social Welfare but was referred to bitingly by Sports Illustrated magazine as “Palm Trees 101.”

- Lloyd Daniels, a highly acclaimed young basketball player, was admitted to UNLV last summer although he had attended four high schools in three states, had graduated from none of them and was said to read at the second- or third-grade level because of dyslexia. In February, before he played a single minute for the UNLV’s Runnin’ Rebels, he was arrested on drug charges. He has agreed to enter a drug rehabilitatio1847619698his fortune in professional basketball.

- Another basketball recruit, 6-foot, 11-inch Clifford Allen, has spent the last several years in detention centers as a result of an armed robbery conviction and problems with alcohol.

Such embarrassments could have been avoided, Knapp said, if UNLV admitted only qualified students, required them to take substantive courses and made sure they did not benefit from easy grading and other classroom breaks.

Knapp said the studies he and Raney have done--they refer to themselves as “both researchers and reformers”--indicate that these policies have not been followed.

Knapp, who earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa and has taught at UNLV since 1976, said he and Raney began to study athletes’ transcripts in 1982 because “nobody really knew what courses they were taking or how well they were doing. . . . There would be occasional newspaper stories, but these were always dismissed.”

Records Protected

It has been difficult for reporters and other outsiders to obtain information about student academic records since the 1974 passage of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the so-called Buckley Amendment.

Knapp and Raney were able to get the information because the law makes an exception for “legitimate educational interest.”

“Our initial reaction to looking at the first set of transcripts in the spring of 1982 was shock,” the two professors wrote in Arena Review. They found a “flight from academia--transcripts littered with numerous withdrawals, failings, D’s and F’s.”

Their first study, published in 1983, found that physical education credits accounted for 27% of the total credits earned by baseball, basketball and football players.

“If deprived of these credits, most of the basketball players and some of the football players would be ineligible to play or to remain enrolled as students,” Knapp and Raney said at the time.

A second study, completed in fall, 1985, found that physical education had dropped from 27% to 21% of earned credits but that when grades for those classes were subtracted, the grade-point average dropped to 1.53 (on a scale of 4.0), for football players, to 1.80 for basketball players and to 2.02 for baseball players. Thus, only the baseball players were above the 2.0 (C-average) level that is “the minimum academic requirement of most institutions,” the two psychologists wrote.

Discrepancy in Grades

They also found a wide discrepancy between grades athletes received in physical education (and to a lesser extent, ethnic studies and social work) and their grades in all other subjects. And they found that the athletes did even better in physical education courses taught by former coaches.

The on-campus response to the findings has been varied. Knapp and Raney contend that they have been largely ignored.

A committee appointed by the Faculty Senate, for example, criticized some of the statistical methods used by Knapp and Raney and concluded that their work “does not convince us that hasty corrective action is at all required.”

“We’ve not been impressed with the actions of the Faculty Senate in these matters,” Knapp said. “We really see it as a need for faculty across the country to exercise control over academic matters . . . but that doesn’t seem to be in anybody’s interest.”

Prof. William C. Marchant, chairman of the UNLV Faculty Senate, insisted that the study was carefully reviewed by the faculty panel but was “found . . . wanting.” He added, “I’m not sure that not getting your way is a fair measure of being ignored.”

UNLV President Robert C. Maxson said the researchers were working with “old data” and that conditions have improved, on his campus and elsewhere, since the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. adopted a rule requiring athletes to make “normal progress toward a degree” to remain eligible.

Knapp and Raney dismiss this claim as naive.

‘New . . . Deviance’

“In our view, new regulations will only bring new forms of deviance,” they wrote. “Despite the high rhetoric of university presidents and academic officers, at many campuses it can be no other way. The . . . economics will not allow it.”

Dean Thomas C. Wright of the College of Arts and Letters, meanwhile, said “it’s probably true” that Knapp and Raney have been ignored. He suggested that this is because “the faculty doesn’t like to have this thing thrown directly in their face, where they can’t duck. It’s a little bit embarrassing.”

Some of the comments by Maxson and Wright suggest that Knapp and Raney may have had more effect on the way UNLV treats athletes than they think.

Maxson noted that the Athletic Department spends $250,000 a year on academic counseling for athletes, mostly in basketball and football. Six full-time academic advisers are employed, along with dozens of graduate student tutors.

“I have a basically unlimited budget for tutoring,” said Ann Mayo, the academic consultant for basketball.

Mayo said 33 of the 74 basketball players who have been on coach Jerry Tarkanian’s teams in recent years have graduated. Athletic Director Brad Rothermel said the 44% graduation rate compares favorably with rates at other state universities.

2 Team Graduates

A wire service photograph from last month’s UNLV graduation ceremonies showed Tarkanian with five of the six seniors from this year’s team, all in caps and gowns. Only two of the five players actually graduated, however--Gary Graham and Leon Symanski. Three others--Freddie Banks, Eldridge Hudson and Armon Gilliam--are expected to complete their requirements during the summer, while a sixth, Mark Wade, will require another semester to finish his work, university officials said.

Gary L. Jones, professor of political science and past chairman of the Faculty Senate, said complaints about advising for athletes have led to improvements in academic advising for all students.

Another significant change is that the academic-athletic advisers report to the university’s academic administrators, not to the athletic director.

Meanwhile, Academic Vice President John M. Unrue, who said he was “absolutely appalled” when he learned about the “Palm Trees 101” course, has promised that “no such course will ever be offered on this campus again.”

Wright said he cannot interfere with grading practices of individual faculty members except in extreme cases, but he said he is keeping a close eye on grades in the Social Work Department.

“The department is tired of athletes finding a haven in social work, and so am I,” Wright said. “We’re determined that social work will be seen as a serious major.”

‘Dramatic Improvement’

These and other changes, Maxson said, are evidence that “there’s been a rather dramatic improvement” in academic-athletic relationships. “We’re not going to bring people in to play four or five years and not have them be close to graduation,” he said.

Some members of the university community remain skeptical, however. Las Vegas, they point out, is a sports-crazy, especially a basketball-crazy, city. The Runnin’ Rebels team, which compiled a 37-2 record last year and reached the semifinals of the NCAA tournament, averaged 18,251 spectators per home game last season and earned a $2.5-million profit for the Athletic Department.

“You have to remember, this is a university that grew up around its basketball team,” said a longtime observer of UNLV sports.

Knapp and Raney, likewise skeptical about improvements in this environment, are continuing their work. After completing their current look at the records of junior college transfers, they will update their studies of baseball, basketball and football players to see if things have changed.

“Are things better?” Knapp asked. “I don’t know. I hope so, but I guess I’m doubtful.”