The-Ave.US

from the Provost

Dear all,

 

Athletics does not report to the Provost, they report directly to the President. This is the case at all major universities (and probably all of the minor ones too).  I am not saying this because I disagree with any of the decisions made, but just to clarify my role vis-à-vis athletics.

 

Of course, the academic progress of our student athletes does fall under my purview. In that sense, although I assume that the quotation marks around “dumb jocks” are there to indicate the term is being used ironically, I do hope that this is not a stereotype that most of us embrace. As an example, UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award Winner Holly Barker has been supervising the undergraduate research of some of our football players who presented this work in the undergraduate research festival. This  certainly shows that they can, and do, participate in the intellectual life of our campus ( see http://seattletimes.com/html/huskyfootball/2022239678_uwfootballindependentstudy12xml.html) .

 

I suspect the higher weighting of the on-the-field performance over the academic-performance has to do with the fact that we have much more room for improvement in the former than in the latter category. We are second the Stanford in graduation rates for the PAC-12, which has a high graduation rate compared to other conferences – a six year graduation rate of 74% This compares with a  48% six year graduation rate for Berkeley. (Stanford’s is 90%). By comparison, we are in the middle of the pack when it comes to championships, bowl games, etc.

 

While I am certainly interested in cultivating our alumni base, and do hope that all our students will contribute to their alma mater according to their means, I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would turn a blind eye to a student’s academic performance because I hope that they will be a future donor. In fact, the way to cultivate future donors is to be interested and attentive to their educational experience while they are here.

 

As many of you know, the UW just had it’s accreditation visit – the accreditation team was made up of prestigious administrators and faculty members from peer public universities. It was chaired by President Gene Block of UCLA, and included faculty members from medicine, arts and sciences, and engineering. They commended the UW in 7 different areas. One of them was in sports. We do not yet have a final report – but in the draft report we received (for us to correct as needed) the commendation read – “ The Evaluation Committee commends UW for its efforts to ensure that student-athletes across sports and affinity groups (gender, race, and ethnicity) demonstrate strong graduation and retention rates.”

 

Ana Mari

 from the Jim Nelson, emeritus faculty

 

Don,

 

This is a great analysis but the money seems to follow the money!  I agree with you that this is a sad de-enphasis of academics.  Luckily I got to play in the Ivy League with an academic scholarship.  But in my day, there were no big bucks in professional athletics.  Now the “dumb jocks” are in line to be some of the biggest UW donors, and I have a feeling that the Director of Athletics and the Provost may have their eyes on this bottom line.

 

Thanks for expressing this your excellent point of view.

 

Jim Nelson

Professor of Radiology emeritus

 

from Don Janssen Associate Professor of Civil Engineering

This past Sunday’s Seattle Times contained an article about the total compensation packages for the head football coaches at UW and WSU. First off, let me say that I am not bothered by the amounts of money they each make.  Many people are, but there is no need to count me among them. I am, however, bothered by some of the criteria used in the salary bonus calculations.  The UW head football coach could have obtained $900,000 in bonus salary last year, just based on how the team did on the field and how the players performed academically.  I am not complaining about the amount but rather that the weighting for winning (including conference championship and bowl games, but not BCS championship – let’s be realistic!) was over 2.5 times the weighting for academic performance (graduation rate and the NCAA’s eligibility and retention metric). Similar bonus compensation at WSU was less – only $325,000 for winning and academics (again, leaving out the BCS championship bonus), but the winning-academics disparity was even greater; a weighting factor of 12 favoring winning over academics. I would like our Director of Athletics and our Provost (both of whom I assume were involved in the development and approval of the head football coach’s contract) to change the weighting in future contracts to favor academics over winning.  And I hope that their counterparts at WSU do the same.
Don Janssen Associate Professor of Civil Engineering _______________________________________________ AAUP-UW

 

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