Filed under: News, Politics, Race and Civil Rights
"That the gap increased rather than decreased is particularly disappointing," said Richard Lapchick, who conducted the study. "The fact that the disparity is bigger now than 2009 is cause for trying to figure out what we eed to do to narrow the gap."
Lapchick argues that much of the gap in graduation rates between white and black players can be attributed to many of them coming from underfunded inner city schools. He found that roughly one-quarter of all schools participating in bowl games graduated less than half their African American players, and that one-fifth of the schools have graduation rates for black players that are at least 30 percentage points lower than the rate for white players.
The results of Lapchick's study are not surprising, and reflect the constant state of the black athlete in this disturbing system called collegiate athletics. The money has become so great in college sports that the goal of educating students has become subjugated to the greater ambition of getting rich by stealing the labor rights of other human beings.
If the NCAA wanted to fix the graduation gap, they could easily do that. You could start by not taking players out of classes to make long road trips to play in sporting events. You could allow students to actually choose their own majors instead of allowing universities to cluster the athletes into the same classes granting them worthless academic degrees. You could also open the door for independent oversight by outside entities to ensure that athletes are not having their academic priorities deliberately pushed aside by 50-year old men seeking multi-million dollar bonuses for winning a bowl game.
When it comes to determining the NCAA's priorities on graduation rates, the proof is in the potato salad: While many coaches are given multi-million dollar incentives for winning games, their contractual incentives for academic performance are virtually non-existent. If a coach graduates players and wins just a few games every season, he will never receive the same number of university job offers as a coach who wins games and doesn't graduate a soul. The NCAA knows exactly what it's doing when black athletes aren't graduating, and aren't being compensated. Exploitation rarely happens by accident.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the Athlete Liberation and Academic Reform Movement (ALARM). To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.