According to a study released by the University of Central Florida last week, out of the 56 college football teams headed to post-season bowls this season, the Badgers are one of 23 to have an Academic Progress Rate of below 925.
Translation: less than 50 percent of the football team this school backs so vigorously is expected to graduate.
And while UW may be in the good company of 22 other bowl-bound schools, a closer look reveals that Bucky Badger may be in more academic trouble than many were prepared to previously admit.
There was a time when the phrase "student athlete" actually meant something and, in some places, it still does. In 1951, Dick Kazmaier took the Heisman Trophy back to Princeton. During a legendary 27-year career as Ohio State's head coach, Woody Hayes enjoyed the title of associate professor and took to the front of lecture halls during summer sessions. And even in the modern era, Bobby Knight, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, has repeatedly been noted as leading a team of young men with a staggeringly high graduation rate.
The world of NCAA Division III, Division II and non-revenue Division I athletics is filled with coaches like Messrs. Hayes and Knight. The sidelines of Division I women's tennis matches are almost always filled with players buried in books or pecking away on laptops.
When was the last time you saw a Division I football or basketball player with a textbook on the bench?
When Gary Barnett, the head coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes gridiron squad, responded to allegations of a female player being raped by noting that she wasn't a very good player, the school investigated. Before long, he was back on the sidelines.
But when the team started losing games, he found himself out of a job last week.
CU, sadly, may be the extreme example of priorities run awry, but it is not the exception — it is the rule. Academics now take a firm backseat to athletics on too many American college campuses, including UW. While many athletes — including football and basketball players — are outstanding students on their own merits, the anecdotal tales of coaches who ask the admissions office to lower standards are perhaps as numerous as the tales of school-funded tutors who don't do so much to help students learn coursework as to help students complete coursework.
Post-game press conferences can be depressing. At universities known for their learned student body, some of the most poorly spoken individuals stand behind microphones, slurring single-syllable words in patters of incognizance. Too many anecdotal stories now exist of these same students bringing similar levels of rhetorical intellect — or a lack thereof — to their courses on those rare occasions when they grace their professors with the honor of their presence.
Statistically, there has never been corroborative proof of the veritable double academic standard that counts as one of the worst kept secrets on too many college campuses. But now the grim realities of the Badgers donning pads being more likely to leave Madison sans a degree than with one speaks to this very ill.
College athletics are wonderful forms of entertainment and, for those players talented enough to make it as professional athletes, an education easily on par with the accounting classes taken by those who reasonably aspire to be CPAs. But the reality is that entertainment should not and cannot come at the expense of a school's primary mission: academics and education. Each football player on Barry Alvarez's squad who stands on the cusp of failing is not only occupying the enrollment space of one genuine student but, indeed, tarnishing the grand mission of sifting and winnowing.
Sure, it is easy to show that through direct revenues and alumni contributions, these squads make money for their respective schools. But academia must hold itself to a standard higher than the tempting glow of that which is best rendered unto Caesar for fear that the alternative will inevitably create the Coca-Cola College of Letters and Sciences at the Miller University of Wisconsin with an education brought to you by the good people of Target.
Indeed, as the Badgers travel to the Capital One Bowl this January, with a squad apparently consisting of some of the worst students on campus in tow, it seems worth asking if the pillagers gracing the inevitable stream of television advertisements are not perhaps an apt metaphor for Mr. Alvarez's team and their effect on UW's reputation.
Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in rhetoric.
