| > A prof doesn’t care about athletic admissions (those are undergrads anyways?). This gets into a tangential issue but I wouldn't be so dismissive of the consequences. Where I went to undergrad the university had invested a lot of money in bringing their basketball team to NCAA Division I. The program ended up doing a lot of shady stuff to recruit good basketball players, many of them which were discarded from other universities due to their inability to meet academic standards at their institutions. Guess what happened? Softball courses created for the athletes (someone has to teach them). This was followed by rumoured intimidation of instructors by coaches who had the immediate backing of the university's president (who has the power to make your job/life miserable). In practice, most of those who took the grunt were lecturers but this wasn't a household even name for sports, just some ego driven project for the president of a public university. Having been a student during that team and paying attention to the reports that came out, I wouldn't discard the possibility of a professor being caught up in major politics as a result of the athletic admissions, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as a downside. For the record, and not that it even matters, I was an academic. |