Auburn University may be facing a troubling blurring of the lines between academics and athletics if a recent report from Ben Cohen of the Wall Street Journal is to be believed. Per Cohen, top Auburn athletic department officials offered to use funds from the universities various sports programs to help "pay its professors and support staff" if the school would ensure that public administration, an unpopular undergraduate major that is for some reason quite popular among athletes - as of the 2013 fall semester, "more than half" of the approximately 100 students majoring in it were athletes, including "nearly all of the top stars" on the Auburn football team - was not eliminated.
Student athletes at top programs, asked to spend nearly all of their time preparing for and concentrating on their athletic endeavors, often gravitate to majors with the least amount of heavy lifting required academically.
In 2013, Auburn's curriculum review committee concluded that the major "added very little to the school's academic mission" and voted to eliminate it, at which point athletic department officials stepped in.
Per the report, internal documents and emails indicate that the committee's decision was overruled by "top administrators" after being met by "significant opposition" from Auburn's athletic department. Top athletics officials met with the school's provost to plead with him to keep public administration and offer the use of athletic department funds as stated above.
Auburn's senior associate athletic director Gary Waters wrote an email in Jan. 2013 suggesting that the athletics department had made "similar investments in academic programs during the last few years," adding that it simply hadn't been publicized.
"If the public administration program is eliminated, the [graduation success rate] numbers for our student-athletes will likely decline," an internal athletic department memo from December 2012 read, per Cohen.
An Auburn spokesperson denied that the athletic department holds any undue sway over academic decision-making and indicated that the university has seen athletics donations to assist several academic programs over the years, "but public administration is not one of them," according to Cohen.
This, of course, would not constitute the first instance of a university coming under fire for providing questionable majors seemingly created specifically for student-athletes. The NCAA launched an investigation into North Carolina after an internal investigation revealed that numerous football and basketball players were enrolled in "no attendance" classes within the African and Afro-American Studies departments, the main requirement of which was the submission of a single research paper.
