REPORT FROM THE SENATE
FACULTY ATHLETIC REPRESENTATIVE (FAR)
 
Remarks to Faculty Senate on January 23, 2008
By Peter Nicholson

I will be brief, but I’d like to do a couple of things.  First of all, I’d like to describe very quickly my position because there might still be some who do not know what the Faculty Athletics Representative is.  The position, and the title, were created by the NCAA, which requires that there be a member of the faculty to perform certain designated tasks, among them certifying the academic eligibility of every student-athlete.  The “representative” part comes from the fact that I represent the University, along with the Athletics Director and the Senior Woman Administrator in the Athletics Department, at meetings of the NCAA, of Division 1A, and of the Western Athletics Conference.  The Faculty Athletics Representative at UH is a half-time position in the Chancellor’s office; in my other half, I am a faculty member in the English Department, where I have taught for 34 years.  I was appointed FAR by Peter Englert, but under an agreement with the Faculty Senate in which I was actually chosen through an application process by the Senate Committee on Athletics, and I was appointed to a five-year term, of which I have two and half years to go.  Part of the understanding when the position was created was that I would give an annual report to the Faculty Senate, so here I am.

In addition to the specific duties required by the NCAA and also by the WAC, I also participate regularly in discussions about athletics at UHM both with our campus administration and with the Athletics Department, and there are three areas in which I take particular responsibility: academics, compliance with NCAA and WAC rules, and student-athlete welfare.  With regard to academics, the Senate passed a resolution last May asking that the Faculty Athletics Representative provide the Committee on Athletics with a report on the academic progress of student-athletes each Fall.  This resolution was consistent with an agreement that had already been reached with Interim Chancellor Konan, and I provided the committee with such reports in the past.  This year’s report is done.  It was delayed in part because of the NCAA’s delay in making some data available, and we also have a couple of other details to iron out, but I expect the memo to be given to the committee by the end of next week.  The data it contains are actually almost all publicly available on the NCAA website.  Put together, they indicate that UHM continues to lag behind our peer institutions in Division 1A and in the WAC according to most of the available metrics, but these results are not a reflection on the vast majority of our student-athletes, who have completely respectable records as students.  I will also report that during the fall semester we have had the most productive discussions that I have ever participated in on ways of improving student-athlete academic performance.  I am actually more optimistic now about our progress in this area than I have been at any other time since becoming FAR, and I will share the details with the Committee on Athletics.

During the last couple of weeks we have had a lot of other things to talk about besides academics, as I am sure you know.  It has been a fairly exciting period, and I have found that my role, during the discussions that we had both before and after the Sugar Bowl, has been mainly to remind people of the bigger picture that we always have to keep in mind when discussing athletics.  To take an example that I was not involved in: when the question of the quality of Athletics Department facilities was raised in the press, you saw how quickly the administration moved to broaden discussion to include the quality and the maintenance of our facilities campus-wide.  This is an issue that we, as faculty, need to continue to be involved in because we are certainly going to wish to maintain the momentum that the chancellor has begun.  To take another example: while we have been celebrating the success of our football team, you may have noticed how careful the Department has been to include our championship soccer and volleyball teams in the celebration as well.  These are part of what I mean by the “bigger picture”: we have 350 student-athletes who are not involved in football, some of whose facilities, by the way, are a cause for even greater concern; and athletics itself always has to be viewed within the larger mission of the university.

During this time there has also been a great deal of discussion of the future of the football program, and there has been a lot of reference to the importance of continuing our recent success and even of returning to a BCS game.  I want to try to put those hopes in a somewhat broader perspective.  There is a practical side, first of all.  Left out of the public discussion has been any reference to the WAC Strategic Plan, with its aim of increasing the parity among WAC schools, mainly, though this is not stated explicitly, by bringing the other schools up to the level of Hawai`i and Fresno State, which currently have the largest Athletics budgets.  There will be important benefits for UH from greater parity: from a business point of view, our fans do show more interest in the games that are truly competitive, and increasing the quality of play throughout the conference will help do away with complaints about a weak schedule.  But as the WAC as a whole becomes stronger, the likelihood that any team will go undefeated will diminish, and with it the chance of sending another team to a BCS game unless the present rules change. 

There’s also another side to all this talk about the importance of winning.  As Faculty Athletics Representative, I meet twice a year with my counterparts from the other WAC schools and once or twice a year with my Division 1A counterparts, and we do not talk about who is going to have the stronger football team.  We talk about the lives of our student-athletes and about ways of improving their experience, both on and off the field, and we do so with the understanding that in every competition in every team sport, there is going to be one winner and one loser, but that’s not the most important thing.  Of course we all want our own students to win – that’s one of the goals of a competition; but there is also a very important sense in which we as educators, and by “we” I also include everyone in this room, should feel that the kids on the Georgia football team, who beat us in the Sugar Bowl, or the kids on the Boise State football team, who have been our biggest rivals in the WAC, are also our students too.  I personally am increasingly persuaded that winning is much less important to our student-athletes than it is to the fans, and there may be a kind of warning for us there.  I am not expressing a unique view here, and I know that both in the administration and in the Athletics Department there are many who share this view, but it also happens that we sometimes allow public discussion to shape our agenda for us, and I will therefore continue to represent the position that the success of our Athletics Program and even of our football team will not be measured by its wins and losses; it will be measured by the type of experience that we give our students, both on the field or court and in the classroom, and by the type of young people that we send out into the world after their four or five years at UH.

Finally, one of my roles is to serve as a bridge between the Athletics Department and the faculty, and in that capacity, it is going to be my pleasure to do something that we don’t think has ever been done before, and that is to introduce our Acting Athletics Director to the Senate.

I don’t know if it’s actually necessary to introduce a man who has had his picture on the front page of both newspapers in the last couple of weeks, so I can be very brief.  Carl Clapp has been an Associate Athletics Director at UH since 2006.  Before coming to UH he had 12 years experience as a coach and 15 years as an athletics administrator, most recently serving as Athletics Director at St. Mary’s College in California.  He received his undergraduate degree from UC Santa Barbara.  He has a Master’s Degree from the University of Arizona and he did additional graduate work towards a degree in educational administration at the University of Kansas.  It has been a great privilege dealing with someone as frank, as honest, as open, and as generous as Carl, and even in the short time that he has been our Athletics Director, I have learned a great deal from him.  I hope that you will give a warm welcome to our new Acting Athletics Director, Carl Clapp.