Should UNC athletes get academic credit for what they learn from sports? | Opinion

Caleb Love, a former star University of North Carolina basketball player, planned on transferring to the University of Michigan, but the move was nixed, reportedly because Love lacked enough transferable credits.

Now the rising senior, one of the nation’s most-coveted talents, is looking elsewhere.

The red light at Michigan raised a red flag about what Love was studying at UNC.

The university is still recovering six years after the end of a scandal over fake courses taken by UNC athletes. Presumably, athletes are now taking legitimate courses and enough of them to be on track toward graduation, as required by NCAA rules.

Student privacy laws prevent UNC or Michigan from discussing Love’s academic record, but I wondered what the UNC Faculty Athletics Committee thought of the situation. The response was a surprise.

Erianne Allen Weight, a professor of sport administration and chair of the committee, said she didn’t know anything about Love’s academic situation and couldn’t comment if she did. But she said a problem with a lack of credits reflects not that athletes are doing too little, but that universities asking them to do too much.

Weight, a former University of Utah track athlete who in 2002 set a school record in the heptathlon, says sport is a great teacher, but athletes get no credit for the concentration they invest and the lessons they learn.

While students who major in music, theater or dance get academic credit for honing their talents, athletes invest equal effort to develop their skills without academic acknowledgment, she said. Even freshman athletes who complete a sports-focused leadership academy program are not given credit at UNC.

“I think we’re setting up our athletes on a very challenging path because we are not facilitating academic credit for things that they really should be getting credit for,” Weight said. “What that makes them have to do is balance these two full-time jobs and probably not succeed in the classroom as they would if they were able to focus on just a few classes that they were interested in given all the other demands on their time.”

Weight is not proposing a major in basketball or some other sport. She is saying that UNC athletes should get credit for their physical education and for classes in areas related to sport, or life after sport, such as sports data, group dynamics or financial literacy.

Other universities, especially in the West, are giving such credits, which allow athletes to focus on a lighter load of traditional studies. But Weight said UNC is reluctant to make the change because of the damage caused by the revelation of fake classes.

“At other schools athletes can get 12, 16, 24 credit hours for all of the things that our athletes are doing at UNC but, because the scandal shined a light on athletes, many are scared to offer anything for credit that’s athlete-specific,” she said.

Weight started proposing credits for athletic-related training in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2015, but she has more influence after gaining tenure and leading the Faculty Athletics Committee. In December, she presented research in support of her idea to a meeting of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in Washington, D.C.

“They had a bunch of [university] presidents in the room who said, ‘I’m a skeptic. I don’t know if I believe in what you’re saying.’ But in the end they said, ‘Sign me up. I’m the first to support your ideas.’ Now I have the research to demonstrate that this is the right path forward,” Weight said. “I think that it’s the beginning of a movement, I hope.”

The change, if it comes, will be too late to help Caleb Love and other transferring athletes find their way through the thicket of academic requirements. But it would affirm the concept of a “sound mind in a sound body” and perhaps add substance to the NCAA’s claim that all who participate in major college sports are “student-athletes.”

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com