Re: Outside The Lines (Long but VERY interesting)

From: RCL46
Date: 01 Mar 2002 - 07:31 AM EST

Read the entire article, you will NOT believe what will be on ESPN
tonite...and UC got punished for Charles Williams!!!

ESPN report: Is Duke making the grade?
By BRYAN STRICKLAND : The Herald-Sun
address@hidden <mailto:address@hidden>
Feb 26, 2002 : 11:46 pm ET
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 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 academics.
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.

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