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Blog and Media Roundup - Saturday, February 17, 2018; News Roundup
Topic Started: Feb 17 2018, 04:12 AM (113 Views)
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http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2018/02/duke-mens-lacrosse-scores-7-unanswered-in-fourth-quarter-to-down-denver


TRUE GRIT: Duke men's lacrosse scores 7 unanswered in fourth quarter to down Denver
By Sid Bhaskara | 02/16/2018

Before the game, Duke head coach John Danowski had written the word "Scrap" on the locker-room whiteboard.

Scrap is exactly what his team did, as the No. 1 Blue Devils overcame a four-goal deficit to blank No. 4 Denver in the fourth quarter en route to a 15-12 win before a wet, raucous house at Koskinen Stadium Friday evening.

“That’s what we want to hang our hat on at the end of the day. We don't want to hang our hat on Justin Guterding or Joe Robertson or Dan Fowler or any individual,” Danowski said. “You want to have this collective, relentless persona that it could be anybody that has a great night. When the ball’s on the ground, it’s a matter of a little bit of technique but just a lot more want.”

Scrap defined Duke (4-0) for the entire game, as both sides traded penalties, body blows and turnovers on the wet grass, leaving room for some unlikely contributors to steal the show.

Although the Blue Devils would take a 1-0 lead just 48 seconds into the game on an unassisted jump shot from junior Brad Smith, the Pioneers (1-1) responded quickly with four straight goals. Denver used snappy passing and some lapses in communication on the part of Duke’s defense to get Colton Jackson, Ethan Walker, Colton McCaffrey and Nate Marano open and in position.

Justin Guterding, who once again shined with three goals and three assists, stemmed the tide with his first goal of the evening on a spectacular individual effort as he shot fast enough to beat Pioneer goalkeeper Alex Ready, while the close defense pushed him off balance. Despite Guterding’s unassisted brilliance, Walker would get another back for Denver to put the Pioneers up 5-2 after 15 minutes of play.

Between the sophomore attackman Walker and senior faceoff man Trevor Baptiste, the Blue Devils were under pressure all night. Baptiste, in particular, went 23-of-30 from the faceoff X, allowing the Pioneers to play make-it-take-it lacrosse all night, forcing Duke to hustle for every possible possession opportunity. Walker finished with eight points on six goals and a pair of assists.

The Blue Devils responded in the second quarter, thanks to four Denver turnovers. Graduate transfer Peter Conley and sophomores Joey Manown and Kevin Quigley all found the back of the net on a 3-0 Duke run to tie the game at five. Walker and the Blue Devils' Reilly Walsh traded goals to take the game into halftime tied at six, but the second half seemed like an entirely different game altogether.

The Pioneers came out of the break with all the firepower on their side. Baptiste won 7-of-8 faceoffs in the third quarter, dominating possession after possession with no answer from the Duke unit. Walker and Guterding traded goals 30 seconds apart before Denver went on a tear it seemed the Blue Devils could not come back from.

The Pioneers managed two goals on the extra-man unit, as short stick defensive midfielder John Prendergast was flagged for a pair of 30 second penalties. Walker added yet another goal before Conley stopped the bleeding momentarily. Denver, thoroughly unfazed, slotted home another pair of goals from McCaffrey and Connor Donohue.

The Blue Devils went into the final frame down 12-8 and unable to secure possessions consistently thanks to the brilliance of Baptiste. In that last 15 minutes, stars were made and scrap was displayed to its fullest.

“We got challenged. Our character got challenged and we responded well,” Guterding said. "That’s a testament to our senior class. We wanted to win this game really badly. We’d lost to them three straight years.... We wanted to dominate in the fourth and we went seven-nothing.

Fowler went back between the pipes to man the defense after sitting out the bulk of the third quarter, the rope unit tightened up and freshman Joe Robertson announced his arrival to college lacrosse.

Duke forced Denver into seven fourth-quarter turnovers with relentless effort on ground balls and faceoffs. After seeing little success from inexperienced sophomore Brian Smyth against the best faceoff man in the nation, assistant coach Ron Caputo decided to put defensive midfielder Sean Cerrone out on the faceoff. Cerrone, who had never taken a faceoff in his two years at Duke to date, not even in practice, went 2-of-6, but pursued Baptiste relentlessly after every Denver win on the draw.

Meanwhile Fowler seemed to grow larger in the cage, making a huge save with four minutes to play, and defensemen Cade Van Raaphorst and Kevin McDonough, alongside sophomore defensive midfielder Terry Lindsey and senior long-stick midfielder Peter Welch, harassed the Denver offense.

On the other side of the ball, Robertson scored all four of his goals in the fourth quarter, including three in a row at one point, shooting jump shots, quick sticks and time-and-room rippers off passes from Guterding, Conley and Brad Smith. Robertson, despite his youth, illustrated his instant chemistry with Guterding by being in the right spots for the senior’s passes time and time again.

“I came off a little bit timid at first,” Robertson said. “It’s a big game. Once I settled in, I think that we all settled in. Once the ball came my way, people cut, it set up shooting lanes and luckily, I finished it. Just work on it in practice, and that’s how it goes.”

With a two-goal lead, 70 seconds to play and the shot clock down to one, Walsh caught the goalkeeper out of his cage and, in the fashion of former Duke great Jordan Wolf, took a stutter step and accelerated all the way to the cage to flush it home and give Duke a 15-12 lead. And when it mattered most, down three with just more than a minute to play, Baptiste committed a faceoff violation, giving the Blue Devils a chance to bleed down the clock for the win.

Crashing the midfield, playing physically and running up and down the field indiscriminately, Duke pulled out a win against one of the most talented teams in the nation, defending its No. 1 ranking for the first time in earnest all season. The Blue Devils will follow this effort with a trip up to Pennsylvania next week in Philadelphia.
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http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/education/article_9e82865e-110e-11e8-983f-7f15a080aac7.html


In wake of Tulane survey, experts say sexual assault rates among universities difficult to compare

BY CHAD CALDER | ccalder@theadvocate.com Feb 16, 2018 - 7:30 pm (0)

No one disputes that Tulane University’s latest student survey on the prevalence of campus sexual misconduct laid bare a problem that was starkly worse than some may have expected.

What experts say is harder to decide is whether the figures mean the elite New Orleans university has a much bigger problem than its peers around the country, or whether it simply did a better job of measuring sexual assault by using the most up-to-date methods.

“I don’t know if we’re going to know that answer yet, simply because we’re now better understanding sexual violence research and sexual violence in this country,” said Meredith Smith, the assistant provost in charge of Tulane’s sexual assault reporting.

The wide-ranging survey, developed by national researchers in 2014, found that four in 10 undergraduate women said they have been subject to unwanted sexual contact since enrolling at Tulane. Nearly a quarter of them reported being raped.

The 60-page report was packed with dispiriting figures not only on sexual assault and rape but also on coercion, stalking, dating violence and harassment collected from graduate and undergraduate women, men, students of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer-identity students.
Tulane survey finds 4 in 10 undergraduate women have been sexually assaulted; nearly 1 in 4 report rape

When it was released last month, university officials largely sidestepped the question of whether the findings showed the situation at Tulane was significantly worse than anywhere else.

They noted the survey was taken in the midst of a push to address sexual misconduct on campus and after polarizing events like the national Women’s March and the election of Donald Trump as president. They also pointed out that almost half of Tulane's students took part in the survey, which was specifically designed to combat underreporting.

Cory Cole, vice president of the on-campus student group Sexual Aggression Peer Hotline and Education, said it is possible there is more sexual violence at Tulane than other universities, but it’s also possible the numbers were higher because students were more comfortable disclosing their experiences due to a cultural shift toward supporting survivors.

“Regardless of whether or not Tulane's numbers are abnormal compared to the national average, the numbers are still unacceptable,” Cole said. "Two in five women and 18 percent of men is clearly unacceptable, but the so-called 'normal values' are also unacceptable."

Cole said that while the numbers may have been shocking to some, students were not surprised.

“For people who go to Tulane and who have experienced sexual assault or known people who have, the number is pretty consistent with what we've observed in our own lives,” she said. “These numbers basically confirm what student activists and employees within the Tulane administration, like the Title IX office and the Office of Case Management, have been saying for a long time.”

But the natural urge to compare Tulane’s results with other universities is not easily satisfied, and that’s not entirely an accident, either. Timing, response rates and the survey itself influence the extent to which schools can probe a subject researchers say has been chronically prone to underreporting.

And the survey Tulane used, known as the ARC3, was designed to get a fuller accounting of the problem. Instead of simply asking respondents if they have been assaulted, for example, it asks if they have been subjected to a range of specific unwanted sexual acts, among other methods.

“Typically, the more items you use, the higher the rates are,” said Kevin Swartout, a Georgia State University psychologist who helped design the ARC3. “Respondents are more likely to see something that matches their experience.”
Default expectation

Smith said there is a default expectation that sexual assault rates should be about 1-in-4 but that is simply outdated. More sophisticated surveys, she said, will bear this out in coming years.

“This is not a problem that is unique to Tulane,” she said. “This is a problem at every college in America.”

The recent scramble by universities to measure sexual assault came in response to a 2011 letter from the Department of Education affirming that students have a legal right to be safe from the threat of sexual assault on campus.

Some schools developed their own climate surveys and others paid for privately developed instruments, but the options were expensive. The Association of American Universities developed a survey in 2014, but researchers argued that plans to release only aggregate data meant it wasn’t transparent enough.

Ultimately, only about half of the 60 member schools participated in the survey, and many of those that did not, including Tulane, decided to use the ARC3, which had been created around the same time by a group of sexual assault researchers and student affairs professionals.

Tulane had added questions about sexual assault to two unrelated, more general student surveys it conducted in 2014 and 2015, and they found an 18 percent rate of unwanted sexual contact reported by undergraduate women. But administrators knew the response rate to those surveys was low and the findings incomplete.

“That was the big takeaway from the findings of that survey — we need to do this and do it right,” said Smith, whose hiring at that time was part of Tulane’s response to the renewed emphasis on combating sexual assault.

Comparisons between completely different surveys are problematic for obvious reasons. But Swartout and Smith also say that comparisons even among schools that used the ARC3 are difficult because they are encouraged to customize it as they see fit. The scope of the questions varies and methodologies can differ, as can how — and how much of — the findings are presented to the public.

A review by The Advocate of roughly a half-dozen publicly available ARC3 findings, including those from the University of Texas system and the universities of Illinois and Iowa, found some lower rates of sexual assault and rape but also seemed to indicate that apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult to come by.

All were done earlier than the Tulane survey, and the response rates were as low as 6 percent and 9 percent.

There was one potential point of comparison. Penn State reported ARC3 results in 2016 that included somewhat comparable rates of unwanted sexual contact reported by undergraduates on its main campus: 35 percent of undergraduate women and 10 percent of men, compared with Tulane’s 40 percent and 18 percent, respectively.

In addition to being conducted a year earlier, the response rate was 27 percent, which Penn State called “strong” even though it was 20 percentage points lower than what Tulane got.

Tulane’s rate “is one of the highest response rates that I’ve seen,” said Swartout, who was hired by Tulane in November to independently verify the results and who now chairs a panel of national experts that will advise Tulane on how to tackle the problem.
Trend undeniably upward

The difficulties in comparing surveys, particularly those favored by researchers, is not unintentional. Unlike federal lawmakers who were leaning toward a more consumer-oriented approach as they considered legislation, researchers don’t share that enthusiasm.

"We like rankings, but having comparative data like that doesn't do much good, quite frankly," Noël Busch-Armendariz, a domestic violence and sexual assault researcher from the University of Texas at Austin, told Inside Higher Ed in July 2016. "You want colleges to be able to use their surveys to develop programs specific to their campuses. It's about being transparent and being able to be fully informed about the issues. That's the real purpose of having these benchmarks."

Tulane’s Smith said the trend in sexual assault reporting overall is undeniably upward, as public awareness increases and the science behind surveys improves. She noted that her alma mater, Northwestern University, conducted a survey that showed a sexual assault rate of about a third; it was conducted in 2015 and had a 15 percent response rate, about half of what researchers shoot for.

“This is a brand new ballgame for sexual violence research,” she said. “We haven’t been in the position to have so many different surveys in the field gathering data like we have had in the past few years. Hopefully, more schools will be visible with their data like Tulane has been so we can all get a better sense of how much more the research has yielded.”

Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board opined that the Tulane survey’s definition of assault was overly broad and that its questions about the role of alcohol in sexual assault were vague.

“The school goes beyond rape or attempted rape to include any form of unwanted sexual contact, including a stolen kiss or hug,” they wrote. “The latter may be unwelcome, but are they assault?”

Smith noted a hug was not among the acts considered assault and questioned why anything said to be “stolen” would be considered acceptable.

“I challenge them to look at this broader definition of sexual assault as not something that is more vague but instead more accurate,” she said. “This is what sexual assault has meant all along, and the victimization rates from campus climate surveys from Duke to Northwestern to Tulane and others confirm that this is a real and prevalent issue.”

The Journal noted Tulane incentivized participation with a chance at prizes, which included a chance to win Jazz Fest tickets or free parking, which it suggested could have influenced answers.

Swartout said he did not think the broad array of questions asked would create any false positives. “I don’t think anyone could say that using more (questions) would lead to any kind of bias or false reporting,” he said.

Smith said she suspects the Journal’s board would take issue with anything that challenges conventional norms on the subject.

“We stand by our survey, and we stand up for addressing issues head-on,” she said. “We are a research university. Who would we be if we didn’t want to learn as much as we could about this and solve it?”
Edited by abb, Feb 17 2018, 04:16 AM.
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http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/02/16/msu-trustees-interim-osteopathic-dean/110482292/

MSU board battles critics over Nassar fallout
Kim Kozlowski and Karen Bouffard, The Detroit News Published 6:50 a.m. ET Feb. 16, 2018 | Updated 4:17 p.m. ET Feb. 16, 2018

East Lansing — With many still furious over the Larry Nassar scandal, students and faculty demanded Friday that the Michigan State University Board of Trustees directly address sexual assaults before the university moves on.

Protesters twice interrupted a three-hour long board meeting to deliver that message.

One of those who spoke out was Natalie Rogers, representing #ReclaimMSU, a coalition formed in response to the institution’s ability to respond, prevent and investigate sexual misconduct.

“The current administration’s attitudes and inaction toward discrimination, harassment and sexual violence on campus are unacceptable,” said Rogers, a sophomore from Canton Township, after she went to the front of the board meeting during the public comment portion. “It is time to stop prioritizing the brand and reputation.”

Earlier in the meeting during a discussion on Interim President John Engler’s proposal to realign health care at the university, a faculty member burst out of the audience and declared the board needed to discuss “the real issues.”

“We are kind of missing the point here,” said Jean Boucher, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. “Health is not the issue. This is a management issue. This is a power issue. An abuse of power. You are going on and on and on about health.”

He then stood in the middle of the boardroom and referenced a vote of no confidence in the trustees cast earlier in the week by the Faculty Senate and said: “No confidence. No confidence. Step down! ... We need a new MSU. A new MSU!”

The unrest comes days after authorities transported Nassar — who sexually assaulted at least 265 young women over two decades while he was a university physician — to a high-security prison in Tucson Arizona.

It also comes days into the tenure of Engler, who has moved to fire and suspend MSU associates of Nassar, hired a firm to speed up Title IX investigations, hand over documents related to the scandal to investigators in addition to a letter to U.S. Senate investigators that said MSU current and former employees do not remember alleged reports about Nassar.

After the first board meeting that he chaired, Engler said he is working to heal the community.

“If their immediate pain is because I’m the interim president, we’ll be around when the full-time president gets here,” Engler said. “If their immediate pain is the Board of Trustees, two new trustees will be elected in November.

“If those are the pain sources, so are sort of different than if they’ve been, or are speaking on behalf of people who’ve been assaulted and are survivors. Those things are different because of what the source of the pain is, I guess.”

Asked how MSU can help victims move on from their pain, Engler said, “They don’t have to move on. We have to help them where they are.”

“What we have though, I think, is to recognize there are steps that we are taking,” he said. “We’ve added investigators to the Office of Institutional Equity, that’s part of moving forward.

“When we think about fixing the processes, that’s all part of that moving forward. We’d like to have a lot of meetings and a lot of conversations, but if you’re someone who’s at risk of being assaulted, or you’ve been assaulted, you need action. Help to actually prevent the assault or to actually deal with it when it happens.”

During the meeting, many board members, especially Trustee Brian Mosallam, spoke directly to those who are still reeling from the Nassar scandal.

Mosallam thanked Engler for his actions and told the MSU community that this is only the beginning of things to be done to fix campus.

He recalled a town hall meeting on campus that he recently hosted that was attended by many victims who shared their stories of sexual assault. He added procedures involving Title IX reports need to be changed.

“I was shocked and saddened to hear about all the pain, fear and anxiety that exists on this campus because of sexual misconduct,” Mosallam said.

“Currently, the office of General Counsel’s practices and its siloed flow of information does not allow for Title IX reports and incidences of sexual assaults on this campus to be reported to this board. This needs to be reviewed and changed immediately.”

Some trustees addressed other concerns. Chair Brian Breslin said that in the wake of former President Lou Anna Simon’s resignation during Nassar’s criminal proceedings, the board needed a leader to step in immediately.

Vice Chair Joel Ferguson said he agreed 100 percent, and complimented Engler’s recent days at the university.

“You got us to a running start,” Ferguson said.

During the public comment portion of the meeting, some students, including Sara Bijani, president of the Graduate Employees Union, expressed disappointment in the lack of work the university is doing on sexual assault.

“I encourage you for once to get ahead of this,” said Bijani, a doctoral candidate in history. “Put some real money behind preventing sexual assault. Take some action. Clean this house. Invest in a real campus reporting system that survivors can trust. The system you have now isn’t working.”

In other business, the board approved a new leader for the school’s College of Osteopathic Medicine and extending the contract of football coach Mark Dantonio, who has faced scrutiny over the football program’s response to cases of sexual assault and violence toward women.

Andrea Amalfitano, director of MSU’s Clinical Sciences Institute, was named interim dean designee for the osteopathic medicine school, with a $325,000 salary. He replaces William Strampel, the school’s longtime dean who went on a leave of absence in December.

Strampel has been named in lawsuits filed against MSU and Engler had moved to terminate him.

A Detroit News investigation found that Strampel was one of at least 14 university staff members who received reports of sexual misconduct by Nassar in the two decades before the former MSU sports doctor’s arrest.

Also, the trustees approved the appointments of Bill Beekman as interim athletic director, at a salary of $400,000, and Carol Viventi as vice president and special counsel to the president, at a salary of $250,000.

Engler this month named Beekman, the school’s vice president and secretary of the Board of Trustees, to replace Mark Hollis, who retired last month amid the Nassar scandal.

The board did not approve a contract for Engler, who has served as the university’s leader since the beginning of this month. Officials say the terms are still under negotiation.

kkozlowski@detroitnews.com
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Feb 17 2018, 04:16 AM
http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/education/article_9e82865e-110e-11e8-983f-7f15a080aac7.html


In wake of Tulane survey, experts say sexual assault rates among universities difficult to compare

BY CHAD CALDER | ccalder@theadvocate.com Feb 16, 2018 - 7:30 pm (0)

...Tulane survey finds 4 in 10 undergraduate women have been sexually assaulted; nearly 1 in 4 report rape

When it was released last month, university officials largely sidestepped the question of whether the findings showed the situation at Tulane was significantly worse than anywhere else.

They noted the survey was taken in the midst of a push to address sexual misconduct on campus and after polarizing events like the national Women’s March and the election of Donald Trump as president.
Blame Trump for the rapes????
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https://www.chronicle.com/article/Inside-Auburn-s-Secret/242569?key=VUoegFJonv4-gPdfGkNzj4-JTkfh6ZBlDK9mgIYAAhyu5LdCr3bh48MStNroJvNNbmxLUFZDM0w1bWo3ZEhWTklpUzNsUUZsajB5ZjFPaVctWmRoM24tVmhEVQ

Inside Auburn’s Secret Effort to Advance an Athlete-Friendly Curriculum
By Jack Stripling February 16, 2018 Premium

The new batch of data was unambiguous. Half of the students in one major were athletes. One in three black players on Auburn’s football team was enrolled in the program.

Rather than question how this might have happened, the university’s provost instead offered a plan: Create more programs like it.

"The following report points to the need for more majors that have enough elective courses etc.," Timothy R. Boosinger, the provost at the time, wrote in the late winter of 2015 to G. Jay Gogue, who was then the president. So many athletes concentrated in one major — public administration — can attract controversy, and it did. Offering more programs with similarly flexible requirements would, Boosinger implied, solve the problem.

The provost assured the president that those other programs were in the works, and that he had met with Jay Jacobs, who was then the athletic director, "to discuss the new offerings that are in the pipeline."

The email and other communications obtained by The Chronicle suggest an openness among Auburn’s academic leaders to tailor a curriculum for the specific benefit of athletes, privately discussing the creation of new majors that would best serve a small but high-profile segment of the student body. These discussions demonstrate the power of athletic interests at universities with big-time sports programs and the quiet ways in which they put pressure on the academic enterprise.

The athletics department’s interest in public administration was first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2015. Faculty committees had voted to discontinue the program after its centrality to the department’s educational mission was questioned. But Auburn kept the major after a lobbying effort from athletics officials, who at one point offered money to keep it afloat.

In the fall of 2014, 37 percent of Auburn's black male athletes were majoring in public administration.
Auburn officials say that no money came from athletics. In response to questions from The Chronicle, the university said that the athletics department does not unduly influence curricular decisions.

"The shared governance system at Auburn serves as a type of internal watchdog, guarding against the very type of situation at the center of your questioning," C. Michael Clardy, a university spokesman, wrote in an email. "We as an institution are committed to the integrity and rigor of our academic programs."

"All academic decisions," he continued, "are driven and led by academic administration and faculty leadership."

Nevertheless, the university has allowed difficult questions to persist about how the athletics department exerts influence on academic matters. The blanket assertion that faculty control the curriculum, while accurate as a matter of policy, skims over the manner in which athletics officials at Auburn have advocated for the department’s parochial interests, even when doing so defied what professors said was in the best interest of students.

The story behind Auburn’s debate over the fate of a single major provides a striking example of the intractable tensions that exist between academics and athletics on a campus where sports reign supreme. What happened after the public-administration program was exposed shows an arguably deeper problem: Little came of it.

From the moment that Auburn’s faculty started a process that would discontinue the public-administration major, Gary L. Waters surmised what was at stake: The academic fortunes of one of the nation’s premier college athletics programs, including those of its storied football team.

Waters, an accounting and finance professor, had developed close ties with the athletics department during his years as Auburn’s faculty athletics representative, a position charged with ensuring that members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association maintain an appropriate balance between academics and athletics. In 2011, he joined the athletics department as senior associate athletics director for academic services, a position from which he retired in June.

When Waters joined the athletics department, there were just six football players majoring in public administration, documents show. That number quadrupled after his first year on the job, and, in emails, Waters described the program’s proposed elimination in desperate terms. He wanted to take the issue straight to the president, he told Jacobs, the athletics director. Perhaps, Waters suggested, he could lead an unrelated committee about football tickets, which would be an opportunity to "serve the provost" they sought to persuade.

"Rest assured," he wrote to Jacobs, "that as chair of this group my primary responsibility would be to facilitate a discussion on this topic."

Working on multiple tracks, Waters at one point asked Patricia A. Duffy, the chairwoman of the University Senate’s Academic Program Review Committee, whether some extra money might help to keep the program open.

"The Athletics Department," Waters wrote, "would welcome the opportunity to make an investment in the academic side of the university."

When Duffy asked if she could share this offer with her fellow committee members, Waters demurred.

"In the past, when we have made investments of this type, it has not been publicized," Waters wrote in January of 2013.

Even as Waters worked behind the scenes to save the program, he recognized that cajoling and offering money might not be enough. The plan to phase out public administration, which an external review team of three professors had suggested might not add value to graduates on the job market, was moving through the necessary academic committees. Boosinger, the provost, had already signed off on a plan to close the relatively unpopular major, where less than 1 percent of Auburn students were enrolled. There was still time, however, to stack the program with more players.

A few days before Christmas, in 2012, Waters wrote to Jacobs, "As you and I have discussed, there is currently no policy preventing students from transferring into the program, and any students who are in the program when it closes will be able to finish their degrees."

Waters did not respond to phone messages or emails sent to his university account.

The athletics department’s attempt to stack the program with athletes before it was closed, which has not been previously reported, was a source of considerable tension.

Waters had been told explicitly by Gerard S. (Gerry) Gryski, chairman of the political-science department, where public administration is housed, that it was "not a good option" to place students in a major that was on the chopping block. But Waters persisted.

The football team in particular flocked to public administration, reaching a peak of 33 players in 2013, or 40 percent of scholarship athletes, documents show.

Frustrated, Gryski wrote to colleagues that the program was now "compromised" with students "who were never envisioned as being the principal constituency for this major."

"That’s a disservice to that core group of students and the faculty who teach in this major," Gryski wrote.

Those concerns fell on deaf ears. Boosinger, who stepped down as provost in January, let two months pass before responding to a final faculty committee’s vote to suspend admissions into the program. When Boosinger did finally respond, it was to announce a shocking reversal: The program should stay put, at least until a new dean had a chance to evaluate it.

Boosinger declined interview requests.

Professors and administrators in the College of Liberal Arts were stunned by the provost’s decision, emails show. But their communications also suggest a grudging acceptance of business as usual. Athletics had gotten its way.

"My guess here is that they need some place to put low-performing students who the institution has an interest in keeping academically eligible," Daniel LaRocque, who was then associate dean for academic affairs, wrote to his colleagues.

Anne-Katrin Gramberg, who was dean at the time, replied, "Aha!"

The public-administration episode would quickly have faded from memory if not for Michael L. Stern.

Stern, chairman of Auburn’s economics department, was the first to openly raise concerns about the number of athletes majoring in public administration — a trend that one of his colleagues had noticed while watching a Tigers football game. During a University Senate meeting, in 2014, Stern challenged a report from Mary K. Boudreaux, who was then Auburn’s faculty athletics representative, for her assertion that there was no clustering happening at Auburn, a transcript of the meeting shows.

Kevin D. Liles for The Chronicle
Michael Stern, chairman of Auburn’s economics department, received a trove of documents about the university’s curricular decisions through a public-records request.
When pressed by Stern about public administration specifically, Boudreaux responded, "I have no problem with public administration. Sounds like a good major to me. But anyway, thank you."

At the time, Stern had no sense of the larger story of the athletics department’s behind-the-scenes lobbying to keep the major in place. But he quickly realized he had touched a nerve. The following night, Joseph A. Aistrup, the dean who had retained the program, fired off an email to Stern.

"My most favorite chair," Aistrup wrote. "Did you miss that lecture on diplomacy? I hope I don’t need to explain to someone as gifted and as smart as you that you could have made your point about Athletic Advisors without mentioning any department at the Faculty Senate meeting, especially in our college.

"I know you were trying to beat up on Athletic Advisors, but your remarks did cause collateral damage on PA, in a very public way. They are up in arms, and I don’t blame them.

"Would you consider an apology to your colleagues in PA?

"I highly recommend it and would appreciate it."

Aistrup declined interview requests.

Impolitic though Stern’s approach may have been, he prompted the provost to look into the situation — a little bit. But when Boosinger learned from Waters that more than half of the major’s students were athletes, the conversation quickly turned to where they might direct athletes next.

"As we move forward with the plans for adult education, criminology, and Interdisciplinary Studies/Sports Management, the number of student-athletes enrolled in Public Administration is expected to decline," Waters wrote in February 2014.

Who was "we"?

What were the "plans"?

When the provost was later asked those questions before the University Senate, he said the email was innocent shorthand. Waters and the athletics department, Boosinger said, were not in the business of developing new majors.

"I think he is using ‘we’ in the broadest sense," he said.

None of those programs were created, Auburn officials said. But the trio of majors discussed appears less than random. Two of them, criminal justice and adult education, had existed in the past and were closed around 2006, following a New York Times report that professors in those programs had taught unusual numbers of independent-study-style classes that helped some Auburn football players remain eligible.

Bill C. Hardgrave, who became Auburn’s provost in January, said the university evaluates changes in its curriculum based on what is best for students.

"We’re absolutely committed to academic integrity, and we make every decision based on how it best equips our students to lead, engage and influence," Hardgrave said in an email. "Any suggestion to the contrary is simply false."

Hardgrave is among several new administrators at Auburn, where Steven Leath, former president of Iowa State, became president in June. A new athletics director took the helm at Auburn this month.

The prevailing view of the college sports establishment is that the crowding of athletes in a particular major, in and of itself, is not inherently bad or suggestive of academic fraud. Patterns of the sort on display at Auburn, however, invite thorny questions about whether the academic careers of athletes are artificially constrained — particularly among underrepresented minorities.

Peter S. Finley, an associate professor of sport management at Nova Southeastern University who has studied athletic clustering, frames the problem bluntly: "They are encouraged to major in eligibility," he said.

Researchers have reported that athletic clustering is more common among nonwhite athletes, and that was true at Auburn.

An internal investigation of public administration found that, in the fall of 2014, 37 percent of Auburn’s black male athletes were enrolled in the major.

At the same time, scarcely any black male students who were not athletes — just two of 581 — majored in the program.

What did black men outside of athletics choose to study? The most-popular major was mechanical engineering — the same as for white men.

Tommy E. Jackson II, who played nose tackle on the Tigers’ undefeated 2004 football squad and majored in public administration, said he had legitimate interests in the program and did not feel pressured to study it. But Jackson, who returned to Auburn to complete a doctorate in adult education and worked in the university’s Student-Athlete Support Services office, said it was disturbing to consider that black men like himself might have been constrained in their paths of study.

"If there were efforts to ‘game’ the system to provide a less rigorous and authentic educational experience for athletes without thinking about the long-term consequences for those athletes, that is wrong," Jackson, who is now director of advising for Kennesaw State University’s University College, said in a written statement to The Chronicle. "This is particularly true for African-American athletes who are disproportionately from families in poverty, who are trading their time, talent, and physical health for the social and economic opportunities that can be provided by the right university education — their one shot at the ‘American Dream.’"

Athletes, he continued, can achieve at high levels academically — but only if they are treated as "something other than a transactional touchdown machine."

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The Auburn data are clear: Public administration was not a major broadly pursued by African-American students. It was a major disproportionately popular with a specific set of African-American men who played sports.

But the athletics department labored to link the fate of the program with the success of Auburn’s black undergraduates, just 8 percent of whom are athletes. In a memo titled "Talking Points to Share with President Gogue/Provost Boosinger," Waters suggested that Jacobs, the athletics director, tell the university’s academic leaders that doing away with the major could compromise Auburn’s already "substandard" African-American graduation rate and imperil its U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Not long after the provost met with Waters and Jacobs to discuss those talking points, Boosinger decided to keep the program.

The story of the provost’s turnaround, laid out in hundreds of pages of emails and other documents from the university’s investigation, was provided to Stern through a public-records request. It was a story that Stern says he had intended to tell to the University Senate, but the steering committee voted against putting him on the group’s agenda. So Stern leaked everything to The Wall Street Journal.

What has happened at Auburn since then is significant in its own right. The story was quickly absorbed in the sober confines of an academic committee, and professors by and large showed a greater interest in defending the public-administration program than they did in questioning its appeal to athletes. All the while, enrollment in the major has dwindled, and professors have not been given reports about whether athletes simply flocked to another program.

In the days after the Journal published its story, the provost emailed professors to say that he had "closely examined the facts of this matter" and "found no basis for a claim of impropriety."

"That is a boring story, I fear, but it is the truth," Boosinger wrote.

The provost had appointed a committee to explore the issue of athletics clustering at Auburn and similar trends at other universities, but the group did not set out to deeply interrogate whether athletics had interfered in curricular matters.

"I did not see that as the primary charge at all," said Daniel J. Svyantek, a psychology professor who was chairman of the committee.

To the extent that the report questions why the program was retained, it does so at a scholarly remove. These decisions, the committee wrote, were consistent with those of "organized anarchies," acting in a manner that may appear as "non-rational" to outside observers. (By way of translation, Svyantek told The Chronicle that college administrators may be "dumb," but not necessarily malicious.)

The committee relied upon the provost, whose actions are central to questions about who controls the curriculum, to provide the group with relevant emails — only to later discover that a number of germane communications among athletics officials had been left out.

Svyantek said he did not believe that any of the additional emails would have changed his report.

The group did not talk to academic advisers, professors in public administration, or athletes in the major. Instead, the committee assessed whether athletes had been steered toward public administration by interviewing Waters, the athletics official who had played a key role in lobbying the administration to retain the program. Waters told the committee that athletes were not formally steered toward the program, but offered that they might have influenced one another independent of any formal guidance.

The committee recommended, among other things, a broader examination of grading patterns in public administration. Auburn officials said that a further review had been conducted and that it similarly found no evidence of favoritism in grading.

But the findings of that review were not shared with the University Senate. Nor did Auburn’s faculty have an opportunity to scrutinize the committee’s report, which, Svyantek said, was "for the provost" and provided only to the provost.

"As far as I know nothing was done with the report," Svyantek said.

The Chronicle obtained materials from Auburn’s internal review of grade distributions. While it may not have identified evidence of favoritism toward athletes, the review examined numerous course sections where the passage rates for all students reached 100 percent. In a 4000-level class geared toward seniors, an instructor awarded A’s or B’s to 90 percent or more of his students across four different sections.

Meantime, enrollment in public administration has plummeted. In the four years since the first questions were raised about athletes in the program, the number of public-administration majors has fallen by 41 percent, to 66 students this past fall. The decline has been particularly precipitous among African-American men, whose numbers have dwindled to a dozen, a 72-percent decrease.

The major, which had a high number of elective offerings when athletics enrollments peaked, may have been appealing in part for its flexibility. In the years since public administration drew scrutiny, professors have tweaked the curriculum, reducing the number of electives.

Clardy, the university’s spokesman, said that Auburn does not know why enrollment fell so fast, because the university does not "catalog specific motivations" for students’ selection of majors. He posited that the reduction of electives may have been a factor, but he dismissed the suggestion that athletes might have been steered away from the program once it drew attention.

"There is no evidence that Auburn discourages student-athletes from enrolling in the public administration program," Clardy wrote in an email. "Students make their own decisions of what majors and programs to pursue. Any implication that the administration has persuaded them in a particular direction is misguided."

“I didn't see that half the students were athletes. I don't track that information.”
Kathleen M. Hale, director of public administration, says she has not questioned how so many athletes came to be in the major and she does not see it within her purview to do so.

"I didn’t see that half the students were athletes," Hale said. "I don’t track that information. I’ve known all I can know within the limits of time and space.

"I’m an active researcher and publisher and a pretty good teacher, and I’m active out in the discipline," she continued. "I hope it’s not disappointing that I didn’t work 300 hours in one week."

Much as the university has tried to put this episode behind it, relationships that soured in the immediate aftermath have only gotten worse.

Tensions between Stern, the economics chairman, and Aistrup, his dean, escalated to such a point in early 2017 that the president at the time intervened. After what Stern described as several acts of retaliation for whistle-blowing, including the dean’s efforts to have him replaced as chairman, Gogue took the highly unusual step of suggesting that the entire economics department be moved elsewhere.

In a memo written on presidential letterhead, Gogue recommended that Stern be assigned a new supervisor and that the department "no longer be a part of the College of Liberal Arts."

But the proposal died shortly after Gogue retired from the presidency.

“What they have done to me is necessary to keep people in line.”
"What they have done to me is necessary to keep people in line, or you will have other people who will speak out," says Stern, who provided The Chronicle with the documents that he had previously given to The Wall Street Journal and other materials he obtained afterward. "There must be penalties for those who don’t play ball, and there have to be rewards for those who do. Auburn has been cleansed of dissent."

Gogue did not respond to interview requests. Nor did Leath, his successor.

Clardy, the university’s spokesman, said that Gogue had second thoughts about moving the department. The Chronicle requested documentation of the president’s change of directive, but none was provided.

Some economics faculty members say that they are convinced that the dean has it in for them, and that the feud has gotten personal. The antipathy is so strong that no one seemed to blink when a professor put a picture of Aistrup arm in arm with Jacobs, the athletics director, on his office door, alongside photos of Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un.

Longtime observers of the university see this latest conflict as part of a cycle at Auburn, where critics inspire fleeting consternation and public outrage, only to see the university shrug and move on until athletics overreaches again. It is a pattern that Mark Burns, a retired associate professor of political science who taught occasional courses in public administration, describes as deeply embedded in the university’s history and culture.

Burns and his wife, who also spoke to The Chronicle, both recall an incident about 25 years ago when an athletics official, whose name they could not remember, called to ask whether a health-administration program that Burns had established would be "a good major for a student athlete."

Burns, naïvely, asked about the student’s academic interests.

"He said, You don’t understand, would it be a good major?" Burns recalls.

There were a lot of promising career avenues for graduates of the program, Burns continued. There was also a tough math requirement.

"I said, Now you tell me, would this be a good major for a student athlete?’" Burns recalls. "And he said, Nice talking to you."

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling,
or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.
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