The Tail Wags the Dog... Again. This Time an Ethicist Falls to the College Sports Crazy Machine

The headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Ethicist Who Crossed the Line

Brad Wolverton reports that Jan Boxill, a philosopher at UNC-Chapel Hill, head of one of their Ethics Centers has been complicit in steering athletes into fake classes that included no attendance or evidence of learning or writing of any kind.

This really makes me sick.

I have a little bit to say about Jan Boxill. The Chronicle article, by the way, is deeply flawed. Click here to read the Guardian and to find links to the actual report.

Jan Boxill was an important source in philosophy and sport, in particular ethics and sport. I've benefited from her work. She also was apparently a fixture in UNC campus life. The school decided to pretend many, many, athletes who could not pass a class were students. She would have had to defy the school to reveal the truth. The administration could have caught this if they ever looked into it. Jan Boxill's work will now be harder to read.

As someone trying to read and write philosophy of sport, I can tell you that there already is a problem with it being taken seriously. This will not help.

We know that ad hominem arguments are invalid. We know that she may well have been correct while writing about ethics and sport while all wrong as an advisor. But actually, there may not need to be as strong a divide drawn between her theoretical work and her work subordinating education to athletics. In fact, a running theme in her work is an explanation of why sport fascinates. She considers playing to be a free, creative, act of the sort that the world of work fails to provide.

Sport, I maintain, fascinates for many reasons, including its beauty and its display of morally heroic virtues.  Human beings admire the beauty and grace in sport; they are moved by the discipline of the best athletes; and often it is the heroism and courage in sport that they applaud, not the violence which occasion the display of these virtues. (Jan Boxill, "Introduction: The Moral Significance of Sport"; in Sports Ethics: An Anthology; Jan Boxill, ed.; Malden, MA: Blackwell; 2003.) 

Boxill writes very well about why sport presents virtue and often presents a microcosm of the society that organizes sports. Boxill's description of the fascination the game poses for the player and the viewer cannot be trumped by her ethical lapse. Her descriptions help explain it. I often state that "it is the beauty that makes us insane" when it comes to sport.

I can't imagine anyone trusting UNC Chapel Hill if all they do is fire Jan Boxill and one other deceitful professor (who organized classes no one attended) and then say sorry. But these high-revenue programs steer the school. I couldn't imagine anyone going to Penn State after they merely lost a couple of coaches and their president. Penn State still has the football program that steered the whole school crazy. Penn State and UNC are not structurally different from all those other schools where the tail wags the dog.

from laxmagazine.com

An aside: Fandom entails an emotional connection. Who could go cheer for a team once used as a child rape magnet? That Nittany Lions logo was in the locker room. Being a fan there will require deflection and denial-- not good virtues for a school. This makes it harder for me to watch schools with the same structure play games. Some people aren't going but those who challenge the culture at Penn State-- which was cited as a problem in Louis Freeh's report-- are often threatened.

While the Penn State scandal, the rally to support football there, and the lack of consequences is on another level, the UNC fake credit scheme is outrageous. UNC conducted a massive scam. 3,000 students got college credit for a class they did not attend. Boxill was not their fake professor but she was advisor to many of them. She knew what was going on. She was earlier the elected Chair of Faculty and served as the director of the schools' Parr Center for Ethics. Her time as head of faculty has ended and she has, naturally, been replaced at the Parr Center. The press release has no explanation and is signed by a dean who still has some explaining to do.

Boxill may well have seen herself as helping students she liked. An e-mail of hers shows her lobbying for a "D" for a student who has finished playing and needs to graduate-- and who had plagiarized the paper. She liked student athletes and explains why in her work. This sort of things happens outside of sport as well. Of course, in helping students she liked, she harmed students who would have used their scholarships to, you know, learn things. She also harmed professors who want students to, you know, learn things.

I hate to be sarcastic here. I do not want to see Jan Boxill thrown under the bus. Her e-mail exchange was bad but that stuff happens now and then. We should note that many, many, on-line classes are open to similar abuse. Not all work is done by the student who gets the credit. How does the instructor know? This isn't treated as the obvious scandal.

I was reluctant to mention Jan Boxill's husband, Bernard Boxill, but his name will come up. I would doubly hate to see very good work on his part called into question. His book, Blacks and Social Justice was written in the eighties but still constitutes an excellent introduction to political philosophy and proof that it can be clarifying and relevant. I read it as a new grad student and it kept me going. Almost every anthology on race and philosophy has included a good essay from Bernard Boxill. While there is no reason to besmirch this work, which covers issues like economic distribution, the history of African-American political thought, international obligations, affirmative action and reparations, I worry that this will happen anyway.

And Jan Boxill's work still deserves a critical read. Just because she lost sight of priorities doesn't mean she can't help us see the motivation for putting up with such madness. Deans, the president, and the NCAA have a lot to answer for. Would they have found this fake class if they wanted to. Upton Sinclair once said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Blaming the Ethics of Care

When I worry about Bernard Boxill and African-American Studies getting an unfair deal, I can only point to the treatment given the "ethics of care" which is cited as a potential source of Jan Boxill's loss of moral compass. The author Brad Wolverton cites Richard Southall who is a sports management professor who had written in her anthology. (No philosopher was contacted for this article.)

Southall says to Wolverton that Boxill argued that the ethics of care should be mentioned alongside other approaches in a book that she edited on sports and ethics. And then either Southall and Wolverton or just Wolverton speculate.

But the ethics of care should be featured in a book on sports ethics. It is an important debate in ethics. In fact, I have not seen Jan Boxill argue for the ethic of care, though there is much there that I have not read. (If anyone knows let me know.) The fact that she argue for its inclusion is no evidence that she believed in it or that it warped her.

The ethic of care arose in some feminist philosophical circles and argued that care can be as strong a source for ethics as justice. Many feminists were not on board. There was a very rich debate about the place of care in ethics and its potential to fill in where justice-based ethics were too abstract or otherwise skewed.

If only there were sources on the ethics
of care...

If you blame something, you ought to describe it. Here is the ethics of care according to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"In a nutshell, Mr. Southall said, the ethics of care puts the needs of an individual foremost, looking out for what’s in his or her best interests."

No it doesn't. In fact, I would not be surprised if Mr. Southall did not say this and Brad Wolverton just couldn't follow. If Wolverton knew anything about philosophy, he would not have considered this quote evidence. The ethics of care does not entail exploiting people on behalf of those you care about. Sure, there are "duties of care" that family members have towards each other, teachers have for students, and advisors would have for advisees. But care does not trump all fairness. If your interpretation of something is crazy town, you ought to re-investigate.

A concept rooted in feminism is  given a skewed description (again) and then it is blamed for corruption. To be more accurate-- it is a possible source of corruption. Is it? Philosophy and feminism are often interpreted as if its adherents were weak or nonsensical. Look at that quote. Would you attribute strong thinking to someone who argued that care could justify deceit and a general mocking of education. Did I mention no philosophers were contacted for this article? The Chronicle should apologize.

Is Caring for Athletes Even Remotely the Problem?

Caring about sports might cloud your judgment. Caring for students wouldn't lead to the world of big time college sports. These students practice for hours and often aren't given classes they need because everyone is pretending they are qualified to attend a college. If the SEC and other big schools weren't bringing them in, the very talented could prove their athletic skills while acquiring skills in reading in writing at a Community College or a minor league team with a literacy program. Caring for sport is not the same as caring for students.

There is a reason the school puts an adjunct in charge and not someone with the security that tenure would provide. Tenure is not just an award for academic labor. It holds up a light to shady corners. We should remember John Dewey's arguments when the AAUP campaigned to formalize tenure in the early 20th century. Dewey cared more about promoting public conversation that private perks for professors.

That the school used an Afro-Am department this way is extra sickening. Most Afro-Am courses I know about are too rigorous for most Freshman, it should be said here and will have to be said again. UNC allowed a scam artist to become chair of the African-American studies department. Other Black studies programs already face problems being taken seriously. African-American studies grads at UNC should call a lawyer.

The small uptake: Why on God's green earth would a college be able to keep a scholarship athletics program after this? Suspend it. "Why punish all the student athletes?" UNC should be required to keep funding them at UNC or wherever they transfer. That would be called an adequate punishment. Suppose I were to say "Such a scholarship would give them more time to study." You may well have thought "They don't want that." That perception is poisonous to a school. Actually, I can list quite a few athletes who clearly benefited from their education. This is not a lost cause. Schools can just learn to live without players who can't attend real classes or write their own papers.

This ad popped up in a search. You can love a
game and still tell the truth about it.

Some more objections: "You can't suspend the football program. They want to be athletes at UNC." I bet they do. They can't have it at the expense of schooling. "Students demand athletics and will transfer." UNC ought to be punished. If a serious review of athletic practices were to happen, these students could wander like Cain. Intramural or non-scholarship athletics wouldn't be banned. I know its not the same but you cannot have the same after all this mess.

3,000 people in a fake class. I have students who hear this exists (and hear it defended by sports commentators) and it poisons them. Students think they are suckers for not cheating. They are outraged when I don't let them do it over. Don't let UNC do it over.

The OSU marching band forms the eye of Sauron

The big uptake: All schools with big revenue programs need to acknowledge that the pressure has gotten poisonous. Phase out this imbalance in power. The NCAA lists how many student athletes there are in an effort to argue that these incidences are rare. They are not that rare. There have been well-documented rapes. There have been riots after games. Vulnerable adjunct professors are pressured and fan professors are found in order to dig up favors and fake credits. I don't know exactly how but phase this out. Schools are playing with fire when it comes to the programs. The desires of alumni and students and administrators are distorting judgments.

The Pumas in Mexican Soccer bear the name
of the Autonomous National University of
Mexico and they play near campus. Fans tend
to be alumni or students. But the players are
pros and not required to be students and no one
at the school has to pretend anything.

If the Cardinals can represent "Saint Louis"
with no residency requirement for players,
why can't the "Tarheels" represent the
UNC with no pretend academic requirements?

One possible answer: License out the name of the university to pro teams. The SEC could just stop pretending they are looking for students. (As part of the deal, give the players tuition when they are finished playing ball.) Schools would probably raise more money this way. Another possibility: pro leagues could start a minor league as an option for athletes who don't want to be in or can't handle college. Or both. There may be other fixes. Just quit pretending this isn't a nightmare.

Most objections just assume this cannot change. But it can. There are other games to watch and people will watch them if these disasters keep happening.

I've had a few friends with kids looking at colleges. I don't have a lot of particular college advice. Personal preferences matter. Big school/ small school. Big city/ small town. Whatever floats the kid's boat. But stay away from all schools with big revenue sports programs.

I've liked every coach I've met who works in a school where the programs make more sense. No scholarships but you lose your place on the team if you can't get decent grades. I put it in my syllabus that I will contact the coach if a student tells me that the sport has made them too busy to finish an assignment. Coaches promote attendance. This helps me teach.

Not one European college president or admin has ever had to deal with an athletics scandal. Think how much head space and time that leaves for school. You know, for learning things.