Goss asks faculty to give athletes options

Two top administrators met with the University’s faculty governing body yesterday to discuss University policies.

At his first official meeting in front of the Senate Assembly Committee on University Affairs, Tom Goss, the new athletic director, outlined the University’s responsibility to its student athletes

Goss said the academic options of student athletes are often unfairly limited.

Goss

“We have an obligation to our student athletes as they come into these schools,” Goss told SACUA members attending yesterday’s weekly meeting.

Provost Nancy Cantor also met with the committee to give a foundation of values for the University’s new form of accounting called Value Centered Management (VCM). In this budgeting program, each individual school at the University is responsible for its own allocation, sharing few general costs between them.

Speaking first, Goss said the Athletic Department should be concerned with helping student athletes get into the courses and careers they want.

Goss said many athletes end up in the School of Kinesiology because they have no other choice due to their own athletic schedules.

“We do have a great number of our kids in Kinesiology,” Goss said. “I’m not sure all of them want to be there.”

Goss pointed to schools such as the University of California at Los Angeles, where there is priority registration for student athletes in order to allow them first pick at classes.

“Our athletes are put at a disadvantage when it comes to classes,” Goss said. “Are they in a position to leave the University and get the type of employment they came here to get?”

Sociology Prof. Donald Deskins, a SACUA member, said he agreed with Goss and said only certain schools have the flexibility and structure to accommodate student athletes.

“The way the people get into that is there’s a structural problem,” Deskins said.

However, Deskins also pointed to a “cultural problem” where student athletes go into schools because their peers do.

Goss said most Michigan athletes don’t have professional athletic careers in front of them and are going to have to go into other fields. Goss said he will make sure that student athletes get what they deserve at the University.

“These students should be allowed to excel and meet their goals,” Goss said.

SACUA Chair Louis D’Alecy, a professor of physiology, said “one of the main ways to do that is by getting the faculty involved into the process.”

Goss was not the only guest at yesterday’s SACUA meeting. Cantor briefly explained some of the values of VCM.

She is scheduled to outline a VCM budget plan when she meets with the Senate Assembly on Nov. 17.

“There are clearly many different values to get represented,” Cantor said. “We need to make sure the budget system represents the community.

“I feel very strongly about supporting interdisciplinary research and scholarships,” said Cantor, who emphasized the importance of identifying things a good budget seeks to address.

Deskins said the values of VCM are unclear.

“We had no ideas what the values were,” Deskins said. “There has to be some sort of value system for the allocation of these revenues.”

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