An Associated Press review of admissions data submitted to the NCAA by most of the 120 schools in college football’s top tier shows that athletes enjoy strikingly better odds of having admission requirements bent on their behalf.

The notion that college athletes’ talents give them a leg up in the admissions game isn’t a surprise. But in what NCAA officials called the most extensive review to date, the AP found the practice is widespread and can be found in every major conference.

The review identified at least 27 schools where athletes were at least 10 times more likely to benefit from special admission programs than students in the general population.

That group includes 2009 Bowl Championship Series teams Oregon, Georgia Tech and Alabama, which is playing Texas for the national title Jan. 7.

At Alabama, 19 football players got in as part of a special admissions program from 2004 to 2006, the most recent years available in the NCAA report. The school tightened its standards for “special admits” in both 2004 and 2007, but from 2004 through 2006, Crimson Tide athletes were still more than 43 more likely to benefit from such exemptions.

Alabama coach Nick Saban offered no apologies.

“Some people have ability and they have work ethic and really never get an opportunity,” he said. “I am really pleased and happy with the job that we do and how we manage our students here, and the responsibility and accountability they have toward academics and the success that they’ve had in academics.”

The NCAA defines special admissions programs as those designed for students who don’t meet “standard or normal entrance requirements.” The NCAA says such exceptions are fine as long as schools offer the same opportunities to everyone from dancers, French horn players and underrepresented minorities as they do to fleet-footed wide receivers and 300-pound offensive linemen.

Texas was one of seven schools that reported no use of special admissions, instead describing “holistic” standards that consider each applicant individually rather than relying on minimum test scores and grade-point averages.

But the school also acknowledged in its NCAA report that athletic recruits overall are less prepared. At Texas, the average SAT score for a freshman football player from 2003 to 2005 was 945 — or 320 points lower than the typical first-year student’s score on the entrance exam.

School officials did not make coach Mack Brown or athletic director DeLoss Dodds available to comment.

In all, 77 of the 92 Football Bowl Subdivision schools that provided information to the AP reported using special admissions waivers to land athletes and other students with particular talents. The AP spent three months obtaining and reviewing the reports through state public records laws.

Ten schools did not respond to the AP’s request and 18 other schools, including Notre Dame, Pittsburgh and Southern California, declined to release their reports. The reports do not identify specific students who benefited from admissions waivers, but they are identified by sport in many cases.

The NCAA sets minimum eligibility standards to compete once a student is in college, but leaves admissions decisions to individual schools and does not compare “special admits” across schools.

Kevin Lennon, NCAA vice president for academic and membership affairs, noted that NCAA schools face penalties, including losing scholarships, if athletes’ graduation rates are too low or if they fail to show adequate progress toward a degree.

“While it’s an institution’s decision on who they bring in, we’re most interested in what they do once they get there,” he said. “And if they’re not successful, there are consequences.”

At California, one of the country’s most selective public universities, Golden Bear football players were 43 times more likely to gain special admissions than non-athletes from 2002-04.

“It doesn’t matter to us if that student is a junior Olympian in taekwondo or the best oboe player in the United States or someone who can really run fast and jump high,” said Walter Robinson, admissions director at Cal. “We still look at that student with the same consideration: can that student be successful at Berkeley if admitted?”

While schools can tout the high graduation rates of athletes, they are not required to track the academic performance of special admits — and few do.

The AP review also found wide variance in how schools compile admissions data for NCAA review.

The NCAA asks schools to provide the annual percentages of special admits for all freshmen and all freshmen student-athletes on scholarship as well as a breakdown by individual sports.

But some schools only supply raw numbers, not percentages. Other schools, such as Florida, say they don’t track special admissions outside athletics.

And several schools report no special admissions but describe in great detail remedial efforts and other programs that adhere to the NCAA’s definition of special admissions.

Gerald Gurney, incoming president of the National Association of Academic Advisers for Athletics, favors a return by the NCAA to the minimum test score requirement abandoned several years ago. He said the NCAA’s “virtually open admissions standards” threaten academic integrity.

“Special admissions, in and of itself, isn’t something to be ashamed of. It does add value to a university,” said Gurney, senior associate athletic director for academics and student life at Oklahoma. “However, when you have students who need such a great deal of remediation, it jeopardizes the very essence of the university.”

Six schools besides Texas reported no use of special admissions on campus: Air Force, Connecticut, Kansas State, Purdue, Tennessee and Virginia.

The AP review also identified eight schools where athletes were no more likely than other students to get a break with special admissions: Arizona State, Arkansas State, Boise State, Iowa, Kent State, Mississippi State, New Mexico and West Virginia.

At South Carolina, All-American linebacker Eric Norwood recently graduated early with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.

Norwood was twice denied admission to South Carolina before being accepted as a special admit. The school softened special admission standards in 2007 after coach Steve Spurrier threatened to quit when two recruits who met NCAA eligibility requirements were turned down.

“When I got here I applied myself,” Norwood said. “I had great support from the academic staff, great support from the football staff. And my teammates, they held me accountable.”

South Carolina athletic director Eric Hyman dismissed critics who call special admissions simply a way to land athletes.

“It’s also a way to get better artists, better musicians,” he said. “It’s not all athletes. If you graduate, if your people are successful, there’s going to be more flexibility. And that’s what we’ve done.”

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Created in 1966 by a man named Maulana Karenga, now a CSULB professor, Kwanzaa honors the Seven Principles during its 7 days: “unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith,” as explained by an article by the CNS published by abc7.”

Read more about “a man”, namely professor Maulana Karenga after the break…

Professor Maulana Karenga is a convicted felon and the founding member of the US Organization, a black power group similar to the Black Panthers.   Wikipedia lists Karenga as “a convicted felon, Karenga served time in prison in the early 1970s after being convicted of felony assault and false imprisonment. After leaving prison, he eventually became a professor at California State University, Long Beach in the Africana Studies department.”

For more information on Karenga, check out his Wikipedia profile.

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]]> http://www.liberal-education.com/2009/12/27/the-start-of-kwanzaa-learn-about-the-professor-who-created-the-holiday/feed/ 0 http://www.liberal-education.com/2009/11/27/binghamton-university-research-studies-get-2-2m-of-your-money/ http://www.liberal-education.com/2009/11/27/binghamton-university-research-studies-get-2-2m-of-your-money/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:07:23 +0000 admin http://www.liberal-education.com/?p=1193 (Pressconnects.com) More than $2.2 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds are pouring into Binghamton University research projects.

For many researchers, the funding will help them hire or retain employees and purchase equipment.

The funding includes:

* $603,633 in National Science Foundation grants for Mohammad Younis, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Younis works to understand the vibrations and mechanics of miniscule electro-mechanical systems. Applications for research include protecting the hard disk of a laptop computer to deploying a side-impact air bag.

* $550,584 in National Science Foundation grants for Eriks Rozners, associate professor of chemistry. Rozners studies ribonucleic acids, or RNA, and seeks a way to chemically modify RNA. The research could lead to new therapeutic measures such as antibiotics or anticancer drugs.

* $360,120 in National Institute of General Medical Sciences grants for Koji Lum, associate professor of anthropology and biological sciences. Lum studies how the malaria parasite evolved resistance to the once-effective medication chloroquine.

* $191,250 in National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grants for Michael Nizhnikov, a postdoctoral associate in the psychology department. He studies why infants exposed to alcohol have a higher incidence of alcohol abuse later in life.

* $126,226 in National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grants for Lisa Savage, professor of psychology. Savage is studying the brain’s cortex, including how it adapts to damage to other regions of the brain. Research could help with treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

* $156,922 in National Science Foundation grants for Adrian Vasiu, associate professor of mathematics. Vasiu is a numbers theorist who studies Shimura varieties, and will write several papers and two books to be used by graduate students.

* $233,427 in National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders grants for Patricia Di Lorenzo, professor of psychology. She studies how neurons communicate with each other in the brain. Her research could help with treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and could also help in the development of brain-machine interfaces like artificial limbs.

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Aaron Raz Link

(Theindependent) Hastings College Alliance will host a screening and discussion of “What Becomes You,” a documentary film by Hastings College professors David Lovekin, professor of philosophy and chair of the department; and Jim Fritzler, professor of theatre arts, at 7 p.m. Thursday in the French Memorial Chapel. Refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public.

The film follows Hilda Raz, a well-known poet, feminist scholar and editor of the “Prairie Schooner,” and her daughter-turned-son, Aaron Raz Link, as they discuss their experience of Aaron’s transgender process and the memoir they wrote about it.

The event is scheduled in recognition of national Transgender Awareness Week, which started Sunday and runs through Friday.

The Hastings College Alliance teaches and promotes safety, dignity, respect and acceptance for students of all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions and strives to create a welcoming and supportive atmosphere for all, whether gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, transgender or questioning.

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Audio coverage on the NPR page.

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The study found that university students in coed housing are 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week, and that they are also likely to have more sexual partners, and use pornography more.

Some 90 percent of U.S. college dorms are now coed, and the study conducted on 500 students from five college campuses showed that 42 percent of students in coed housing reported binge drinking on a weekly basis, and 18 percent of students in gender-specific housing reported binge drinking weekly.

While that doesn’t put coed housing on par with fraternity and sorority houses, the researchers note that binge drinking isn’t exclusively a ‘Greek problem’.

‘In a time when college administrators and counsellors pay a lot of attention to alcohol-related problems on their campuses, this is a call to more fully examine the influence of housing environment on student behaviour,’ Live Science quoted Jason Carroll, a study co-author and professor of family life at Brigham Young University, as saying.

College housing offices generally assume students prefer coed housing and give them the option to ‘opt out’ if single-gender housing is available. Very few exercise that option.

‘Most of the students who live in gender-specific housing did not request to be there; they were placed there by the university,’ said Brian Willoughby, lead author of the study.

A wealth of information on the study participants allowed the researchers to examine other factors that could predict binge drinking.

Their statistical analysis took into account the effects of age, gender, religiosity, personality and relationship status.

‘When we first identified these differences with binge drinking, we felt certain that they would be explained by selection effects,’ Willoughby said.

‘But as we examined the data further we found that the differences remained,’ he added.

The findings are detailed in the Journal of American College Health.

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For much of October, researchers recruited female Duke students to take part in a “sexually explicit” study on Tupperware-style parties in which sex toys, not kitchenware, are the draw.

The ads, which were posted around campus and on a research study Web site, sought female students at least 18 years old to “view sex toys and engage in sexually explicit conversation with other female Duke students.”

Participants will be asked to complete online questionnaires about their sexual attitudes and behaviors and visit the lab for a “one-hour party” with seven or eight women. Not only will the students be asked to complete a second questionnaire a couple of months later, they will receive a gift bag and be given the opportunity to purchase items at a significantly reduced rate, according to the ad.

Father Joe Vetter, director of the Duke Catholic Center, was so troubled by the ads that he contacted researchers at Duke student health services and Dan Ariely, the professor of behavioral economics at the Duke business school and senior fellow at the Duke Kenan Institute for Ethics involved in the study.

“My understanding is there is a concern on campus about promiscuity,” Vetter said.

In recent years, some university health centers have touted sex toys as alternatives to risky sexual behavior and serial promiscuity. The study, Vetter said, was designed by health care workers to see whether such approaches work.

“I’m concerned about promiscuity also,” Vetter said. “And to be honest, I don’t have the solution. … My concern is these students are in this developmental phase, and I don’t think it’s a good developmental practice to just tell somebody to just sit around and masturbate. I don’t think that promotes relationships.”

Vetter hopes to take up the topic on Sunday with students. He wrote for the Sunday bulletin: “Can We Talk About Sex in Church?”

Efforts to reach Ariely and others in charge of the research project were unsuccessful Thursday. The ad no longer appears on the Web site, Duke officials say, because the study is filled.

Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs, said that all kinds of research are important on university campuses and that the sex toy party project went through a peer review process before any students were sought.

“Not all research will make people comfortable,” Schoenfeld said.

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The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops went behind closed doors at their fall meeting Wednesday to discuss, among other issues, what action they should take to increase oversight of the nation’s more than 200 Roman Catholic colleges and universities.

Chicago Cardinal Francis George, president of the bishops’ conference, revealed this week that he had formed a task force charged with reviewing the issue. Its research included a look at what church law says about bishops’ authority over the schools.

The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities has planned a similar discussion of canon law and bishops’ authority at the group’s annual meeting, set to begin Jan. 30 in Washington.

“Can bishops just pull the plug on us? It’s not that simple,” said Richard Yanikoski, president of the Catholic college association. He attended a meeting of the bishops’ education committee last Sunday that briefly touched on higher education. He expected the bishops would more fully examine the issue in their executive session.

The decision by Notre Dame, the nation’s flagship Catholic university, to honor Obama at its May commencement caused an uproar within the church and drew protests from around the country and on the school campus by anti-abortion groups.

More than 70 U.S. bishops spoke out against the university’s decision, a remarkable reaction given that it is customary for only a local bishop to comment.

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“This is totally voluntary,” Quinn said. “It’s time for our university to continue to move on.
“I think that’s why Joe White is taking the action he takes. It’s designed to, I think, make sure that everyone in our state, in our country, our whole world knows that the university of Illinois and its excellent reputation and its scholarship will continue.”
White did not immediately return calls or e-mails from The Associated Press seeking comment. University spokesman Tom Hardy declined comment.
White and Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Richard Herman have been at the center of the admissions scandal.
Last week, the University of Illinois Faculty Senate approved a resolution calling for both to be replaced.
Herman did not immediately return a call from the AP seeking comment.
News reports first surfaced in May that politically connected applicants for spots at the university’s flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign were given special attention and tracked through a list known as Category I. Those reports and documents later released by the university showed that some of those connected applicants were admitted over more qualified ones.
Among the e-mails was one from former Gov. Rod Blagojevich backing an applicant. White forwarded the e-mail to Herman. That applicant, initially denied admission but later accepted, turned out to be a relative of Tony Rezko, the convicted political influence peddler who is a key figure in the federal government’s investigation of Blagojevich.
White has said he didn’t know at the time who Rezko was when he sent along the e-mail in 2005.
Six members of the university’s board of trustees were replaced this summer over the admissions scandal.
Christopher Kennedy, chairman of the board and one of its newest members, said Wednesday that he hadn’t spoken to White but wouldn’t relish seeing him resign.
“I would not take any joy or pleasure in President White’s resignation,” he said. “I think it’s a terrible toll this process has had on a lot of people.”
White became university president in 2005. He came to Illinois from the University of Michigan, where he was dean of the business school.
___
Mercer reported from Champaign.