College athletics programs should learn to think in more
sophisticated ways about how their internal cultures influence
attitudes about the relative value of sports and academics, several
scholars said at a session here on Monday during the annual meeting of
the American Educational Research Association.
Even well-intentioned programs -- those that make a serious effort to
comply with the National Collegiate Athletic Association's expectations
for graduation rates and general academic progress -- tend to send
athletes mixed signals about how much time and energy they should
devote to their studies, according to the speakers, who are part of the
research association's newly emerging subsection examining sports and
education.
Eddie Comeaux, a postdoctoral fellow in education at the University of
California at Los Angeles, and Uma Madhure Jayakumar, a graduate
student at UCLA, presented data from a continuing intensive study of a
Division I football program at a Western university, which they did not
name. The program has several habits of "cultural disguise," they said,
with which the coaches and players mask the fact that the students are
asked to do several contradictory things at once.
The two scholars borrowed their approach in part from the work of Arlie
Russell Hochschild, a professor of sociology at the University of
California at Berkeley who has written about the competing demands
placed on working mothers in the United States.
. . .
Lydia Foster Bell, a graduate student in higher education at the
University of Arizona who is also studying a football team she does not
identify by name, reported similar stories about wink-and-nod mixed
messages. Speaking metaphorically, she said that coaches will, in
effect, "hold up two fingers and say 'Academics come first,' and
they'll hold up one finger and say, 'The team comes second.'"
Ms. Bell has been asking players about their favorite collegiate
academic experiences. They consistently report, she said, that their
favorite classes are relatively demanding ones. She argued that
athletes are more likely to stay engaged with their academic work if
their advisers, professors, and tutors set high
expectations.
