As the inter-collegiate basketball season is coming to a close, there are almost daily announcements of awards to players for their accomplishments on the court. Naismith, Wooden, Cousy, first-team All-American, second-team All-American, and on and on. There are so many awards now that if I played college basketball I’d be a little ashamed not to have earned at least one.
UNC has worked out an elaborate, almost legalistic, policy to determine how to recognize further those players who achieve national or conference prominence by displaying their jerseys in the arena or even retiring their numbers. Unsurprisingly, academic performance is not prominent among the criteria for recognition.
The mission of the university is “to serve as a center for research, scholarship, and creativity and to teach a diverse community of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students to become the next generation of leaders.” The first criterion in any decision to recognize athletes should be acceptable engagement with that lofty mission.
Here’s my suggestion.
UNC should not retire or honor the jerseys of players unless or until they have graduated. Player of the year as a sophomore, “good for you,” but our mission is about academics, so when you graduate we’ll add to that honor, but not before. If sports teams were independent of the university, not obligated to advance the university’s mission, they would be free to recognize whomever they wanted, using whatever criteria they liked. As long as sports teams are part of the university, our leadership should assure that the athletics enterprise advances the mission and does not devalue it.
— Lew Margolis
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