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Easy Class List at Stanford for Athletes: Welcome to the Real World

By Andis Kaulins

I am writing here as a Stanford alum, so I do admit to a bit of bias....

Report: 'Easy' class list at Stanford! - Pac-10 Blog - ESPN

I think what amazes me about this story is that people get all worked up about something that has been going on at probably every university in the country for years in one way or another -- athletes are informed about or inform themselves one way or the other about classes to take just like all other students do.

In making their choices athletes obviously take into account whether a certain course is going to eat up too much of their time, be so difficult that it drops their GPA, etc.

Most students, athletes or not, try to optimize their class schedule, given umpteen personal criteria.

As for "official" athletic department lists, it is of course a smart AD who recognizes that it would be a disaster to lose a star football lineman to academic ineligibility just because he was allowed to blunder naively into a theoretical physics class focusing on mathematical models of special and general relativity. Many a lineman might do academically well there, don't get me wrong, but the demands of college athletics must also be served.

Generally, as far as college sports are concerned, there needs to be a general reality check made in many quarters about "normal" practices and then the alleged standards of good practice should be adjusted to the world as it actually is and not the way people might think it is or should be.

Full post as published by LawPundit on March 10, 2011 (boomark / email).