Michigan Cheats?!

[M Club]

some upton sinclair wannabe had been working on this investigation for months. imagine, all that work, the seminal of your career, and the best you come up with is independent study. really blew the lid off that one, eh. it's only minutes before the major news outlets begin phoning with job offers. and when they don't, well, he'll still be welcome around umich.

[Shoalzie]

Isn't this just an extension of the Jim Harbaugh situation? I'm not going to pretend that every Michigan athlete is there to get a great education. What will piss people off is the idea that the school thinks the student athletes are being held to a higher standard than at other schools when really they aren't.

[Adelpiero]

michigan and michigan st used/still do allow you to buy a diploma. I remember a CNN thing they had, and how Millionaires kids got silly degrees, but degrees by the Michigan college systems. I dont have a problem with it, i mean if some derelict wants to donate a mil for 4 years of college and a degree in basket weaving, why not?

we all know you can buy a degree at USC.

sin,

Laurie family

[M Club]

learn to write.

[indyfrisco]

learn to write.

If you're not struggling to read an Adel post, you aren't reading it.

P.S.
Learn to hit the Shift key. ;)

[BlindRef]

Here's UM Prof. John Bacon's response to the AA News piece on UM Athletics. I agree 100%.

ANN ARBOR, MI (2008-03-28) The talk in Ann Arbor last week was not Kwame Kilpatrick. It was a four part series in the local paper titled Athletics and Academics at the University of Michigan.

Three reporters spent seven months researching the series. It fills about 35 printed pages. Few college athletic programs have ever received such scrutiny.

Why did the Ann Arbor News devote so much attention to jocks in the classroom? Probably because of Jim Harbaugh's comments last year. The former UM quarterback said he was talked out of becoming a history major, and said his Bachelor of General Studies isn't a serious degree.

His claims about the General Studies Degree are easy to knock down. The degree has the same requirements as a history major, except it doesn't require a language. Instead it requires more upper level courses. Michigan BGS graduates include the CEOs of Gateway Computers and Steelcase furniture. It's no backdoor.

Instead of refuting Harbaugh with evidence, Michigan's players, coaches and athletic officials all but challenged him to a knife fight. It didn't help.

Shortly thereafter, the Ann Arbor News started investigating whether Harbaugh's claims had merit.

Here is what seven months of digging turned up:
-Many student-athletes take independent studies, sometimes three or four.
-One psychology professor, John Hagan, has supervised some 251 independent studies for athletes.

These are genuine concerns, but they're easily fixed. Limit the number of independent studies a student can take, and a professor can supervise.

Here's what else the reporters discovered:
-Not every student athlete is preparing for a career at NASA (though some, actually, are);
-And Student-athletes sometimes look for easy classes.
What the reporters did not find were any violations of University, Big Ten or NCAA rules. No professors who wrote papers for students. No teachers who are on the take. No graduates who can't read.

The series has the air of the infamous John McCain expose in the New York Times a month ago. There wasn't an affair in that story, and there isn't a scandal in this one. If you hired a team of three plumbers to poke around your house for seven months, and all they discovered was a leaky faucet, your pipes are probably in good shape.

Let's look at the 1997 National Champion Football team. Coach Carr wrote to those players last spring. I asked to see the letter several times, but he only agreed to show it to me after the News article came out. In it, he writes that of the 96 members of that team, 27 made it to the NFL, and 18 are still playing professional football.

But the team also produced six doctors, six lawyers, four engineers, eight bankers and brokers, and one airline pilot. The team also boasts nine teachers, two professors, one social worker, and one minister. Not one is unemployed.

It seems to me, if all our institutions worked this well - including the media -- we'd be doing much better.

In the seven-month investigation, somehow the reporters never turned up Coach Carr's letter.

Perhaps someone should launch a seven-month investigation of the Ann Arbor News.