Many colleges and universities here
in my native Virginia have codes of honor, most dating back many years and
shining with that special patina of respect we in the Old Dominion reserve for
the best of our traditions.
Absolute understanding of and
respect for the Honor Code at my school was the first priority of freshman
orientation in my day. So perhaps you can appreciate my astonishment about
half-way through my first semester to awaken one morning to the news that several
uppclassmen were no longer with us. They had been present the day before. And
now they were not.
Well into the night before, the
student-run Honor Council had found them guilty of honors violations. And now
they were gone. I had known two of them for years. They had been like big
brothers to me. I was very sad for them.
But it made the concept of honor
very real to me.
And today in the world around us
that same concept seems under siege.
Lying, cheating, and stealing seem
to have slithered into many of our institutions, both at home and abroad.
I first started thinking about this
several years ago when I read Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, a devastatingly honest book about the criminal
behavior at that once-paragon of American business – Enron. How else could that
have happened without a certain sense of permissiveness, a sort-of winking,
nodding, and foot-shuffling among people who deep down inside probably knew
better?
And this morning when I picked up
my newspaper I saw a Page One story that felt like a little foot-shuffling
going on in an unlikely venue.
“Tech to give its athletes stipend
for attendance,” the lead headline read.
Right way an alarm went off…and it
got louder by the time I got to the Sports Pages where I learned that other
prominent state institutions of higher learning were thinking about the same
thing.
The alarm sounded this way to me:
the professionalizing of big-time college athletics has let the camel’s snout get
under the tent flap.
College athletics are incubators
for the talent driving professional sports. And things have gotten awfully cozy
over the years. This stipend business seems to bring the noose full circle. And
since when are those stipends fair when we consider the great majority of
students who will be denied comparable goodies?
It’s alarming too because money
brings compromise, temptation, and worse to an aspect of higher education
that’s shown its bad side many times. Anybody notice what’s been going on at
UNC recently?
And if you’re a taxpayer, you need
to understand that the Tech program alone referred to in the Times-Dispatch story (which you can read by link here) is going to cost $900,000. Where do you think that’s going to
come from?
I think it’s high time we drew a
line in the sand and sent the camel packing. Because with the professionalizing of big-time college
athletics, can the supercilious mummery of “Deflategate” be far behind?
