Florida State University Academic Fraud: Black Male Athletes are Hurt

I received a call the other day from Dr. Deborah Stroman, my colleague at the College Sport Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Stroman mentioned an episode of the ESPN Show, "Outside the Lines" and alleged academic fraud committed by Florida State University.

In the episode, Florida State University is accused of denying their football players a chance to be properly educated. Athletes were having their majors chosen for them (over 1/2 of the football team has the same major), and others were being guided toward educational programs for the learning disabled. None of the allegations surprised me, since I have been teaching on college campuses for 16-years, and it's no secret that education is almost never the top priority for NCAA schools.

The Florida State situation should not be something that singles out the Seminoles for being the only university that doesn't commit itself to educating its athletes. You can look all over the country and notice that most college football coaches are not rewarded very highly for graduating athletes or ensuring that they have high GPAs. Instead, they are rewarded for one thing: Winning. Given that the university makes it clear that winning is the top priority, coaches are then given an incentive to push the athletes away from education and toward athletic performance: Athletes who don't perform lose their scholarships, and those who want to miss practice to do more studying are chastised or punished for not being committed to the team.

Universities turn a blind eye to the egregious incentives of the systems they've created. The result is that black male athletes are the ones being used up and left to die in the cold streets from which they came. The black community should be angry at the NCAA, for the league extracts over a billion dollars per year from the black community, all to fill the coffers of greedy old men (as the mothers of many super-star athletes are being evicted from their homes and living in poverty). They earn money on the same par with the NBA, NFL and MLB, all the while pretending that education is the only reason they exist.

A glaring example of this hypocrisy is The University of Kentucky and their decision to hire coach John Calipari. After seeing year after year that Calipari has very little interest in graduating players, Kentucky offered him over $30 million dollars in his current 8-year contract. For a campus that claims to value educating athletes, the fact that they did not choose a coach with a strong academic record makes it clear that graduating the black men on the basketball team has never been a high priority for that institution. Kentucky is not alone, for many other campuses follow the same protocol. To make matters worse, Kentucky has a terrible record when it comes to hiring black professors or giving them tenure. This should be a shame for us all.

The Coalition for the Protection of College Athletes is an organization formed by black men that has been designed to stop the madness (you can join by clicking the link). Additionally, Congressional hearings should be held to determine why the NCAA has been allowed to destroy the academic futures of so many young men and women. The black community should also be upset about the system, for it profits from the unfilled dreams of many young black males. They throw away their educations and then find that playing in the NFL or NBA is neither as possible, nor as fulfilling as they thought it would be. Dave Pear, an all-pro defensive lineman who won a Super Bowl said that after all of the damage his body suffered from NFL play, he wishes he had never played football in his life. It's time for black men to find a different model of success - I was once an athlete, but I found that being educated not only gave me more opportunities to earn money, but it was easier than spending several hours each day on a boiling hot football field.

The message must be shared - the NCAA needs to be dealt with. Black athletes hold the keys to their own liberation from this ethically challenged system. It won't change until we decide to do something.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Professor at Syracuse University and founder of the Your Black World Coalition. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.