AUBURN, Ala. — According to a detailed report by the Wall Street Journal, the Auburn University athletic department lobbied the school to keep a small undergraduate major available for student athletes after it was voted to be eliminated by the curriculum review committee.
The program in question is an undergraduate Public Administration major, within the Political Science department. In early 2012, a panel in the department reportedly expressed doubt that the major “contributes a great deal to the Department’s education mission.”
In August of that year, the department’s faculty voted 13-0 to disband the major. Later, Auburn’s academic program review committee, the final faculty body to review such proposals, voted 10-1 to place the major on “inactive status.”
But according to internal documents and emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the committee’s decision was ultimately overruled by top administrators after it met significant opposition from another powerful force on campus: Auburn’s athletic department.
The report says top athletic department officials met with the school’s provost to preserve the Public Administration major, even offering to use athletic department funds to pay professors and support staff.
Gary Waters, Auburn’s senior associate athletic director for academic services, wrote in an email in January 2013 that athletics had made “similar investments in academic programs during the last few years,” although in those cases, he added, “it has not been publicized.”
In fall 2013, around half of the 100 students in the major were athletes, with nearly all the school’s top football players, including starting quarterback Nick Marshall.
“If the public administration program is eliminated, the [graduation success rate] numbers for our student-athletes will likely decline,” said an internal athletic department memo in December 2012.
Auburn said the decision was reversed when the newly appointed dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Joseph Aistrup, requested Public Administration remain available.
A spokesperson for Auburn told WSJ the “athletic department has not improperly influenced academic decision-making.”
The report mentions a similar scandal, currently under investigation by the NCAA, at the University of North Carolina where athletes were discovered to be enrolled in “no attendance” courses in the African and Afro-American Studies department, where the only requirement was the submission of a single research paper.
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the agency that accredits Auburn and many other Alabama schools, universities must place “primary responsibility for the content, quality and effectiveness of the curriculum with its faculty.” Further, decisions about majors must be made by people who are qualified in the field.
An Association spokesperson told WSJ that, in general, if the commission received evidence that a school’s athletic department had influenced a curriculum decision, “there would be cause for concern.”
In May of this year Auburn provost Timothy Boosinger appointed an internal committee to review the disproportionate enrollment trends and make recommendations about what actions might be appropriate.
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— Elizabeth BeShears (@LizEBeesh) January 21, 2015
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