|
|
 |
|
He's a winner, he's a whiner. A great leader of men, a great torturer of officials. A squeaky clean basketball ambassador, a calculating self-promoter.
Of course, the former typically comes from the same sources (TV announcers, Cameron Crazies), while the latter flows from just about everyone else in the free world.
--Jennifer Wielgus, Phillyburbs.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
ESPN report: Is Duke making the grade?
'Outside the Lines' segment examines school's academic record among its athletes
February 27, 2002
By BRYAN STRICKLAND
Herald Sun
Duke's men's basketball program often basks in the limelight cast by ESPN.
But Friday night, the sports network will shed a somewhat less flattering light on the program.
The network's 'Outside the Lines' series will debut a one-hour show entitled 'Zero Percent: College's Basketball Graduation Crisis,' on Friday at 8 p.m.
While the investigative report focuses on the fact that 36 Division I schools didn't graduate a single black men's basketball scholarship player that enrolled from 1990-94, the show also devotes a section to Duke.
In introducing the 10-minute piece, host Bob Ley holds up Duke as the gold standard for a successful balance of athletic and academic success. But while Ley says that Duke had a 100-percent graduation rate in three of the five years chronicled, 'the reality might not be as ideal as advertised.'
'Sometimes the Dukes of the world get a free pass, even from the media,' said Steve Delsohn, the 'Outside The Lines' reporter for the Duke portion of the episode. 'So I think it's healthy to sometimes look at schools that have a pristine reputation to see if it holds up.
'We were looking at schools with lower graduation rates, so we decided we should also look at some of the schools with high graduation rates to see if that equated with guys getting a strong education or if there was some coasting going on.
'It's not positive; it's not negative. It's just fair.'
The report doesn't accuse Duke of any wrongdoing, but it suggests that Duke athletes get the chance to load up on easy classes with a preferential registration system.
It says that Duke basketball players gravitate toward sociology, which is considered by some to be one of the easier majors at the school, and it questions the difficulty of the summer-school and independent-study courses that have helped juniors Jason Williams and Carlos Boozer close in on graduating in three years.
'You always look for ways to do things better, and the questions that this show raises and that other people are raising are all legitimate questions,' Chris Kennedy, Duke's senior associate director of athletics, said after viewing the show for the first time Tuesday afternoon. 'You always have to ask those questions, and you always have to look at your practices and your results in light of those things.
'Having said that, I think we do a pretty good job of educating them in all kinds of ways. If you could somehow get the freshman Nate James and the senior Nate James in a room at the same time and somehow talk to them, you'd be struck by how [he has] developed and matured and grown. And that's a result of the total experience - the classroom, the basketball, the social, the responsibilities that they have to assume.'
The ESPN report quotes Stuart Rojstaczer, an environmental-sciences professor at Duke, as saying that athletes get 'first dibs' on registering for easier classes.
Kennedy said that about two years ago, the school began putting all athletes in the first registration group within their class.
Kennedy said the change was made because athletes generally need to secure morning classes in order to free up their afternoons for athletics.
'That doesn't mean, as the show implied, that athletes get first crack at all classes and fill up classes ahead of everybody else,' Kennedy said. 'That can't happen under that system.'
Kennedy also questioned the idea that sociology is the major that athletes flock to because of its reputation as an easy major. According to Kennedy, a study of grade distributions puts sociology in the middle of the pack at Duke.
The report also examines how Boozer and Williams have gotten into position to graduate in three years by taking heavy course loads in summer school.
Boozer and Williams both took two independent-study classes during Duke's second summer session. The show states that during half of the six-week session, Boozer was out of town practicing and playing with the U.S. team competing in the World Championship for Young Men.
Rojstaczer, however, said that independent-study courses run the gamut in terms of difficulty - for athletes and non-athletes alike. Some independent-study courses require constant contact with the professor; others require little more than a paper at the end of the session.
'This idea that somehow summer school is by its nature easier than the rest of the year is vastly oversimplified,' Kennedy said. 'There are things about it that make it more conducive to students doing well - there's nothing else going on, there's nothing else to do. You're not playing or practicing, so your time is all your own.
'So the context of summer school might make it more conducive to doing good work, but I don't believe the courses themselves are easier.'
Rojstaczer told The Herald-Sun last week that he believes the system, not the athletes, are to blame for the difficulty schools have balancing athletics and academi! cs.
He said that men's basketball players are expected to concentrate on their sport year-round, making it all but impossible for them to concentrate their energies on academics.
'It's a system that is set up for failure,' Rojstaczer said. 'They have a full-time job; what do you expect them to do?
'There aren't enough hours in the day.'
The show, which also chronicles academic troubles at Arkansas, Cincinnati and Texas Tech, will re-air Tuesday at 3 a.m. and March 22 at 1 p.m.
|
|
|
|
|
