By Vaughn Wilson
How are we here again? How did we get here from where we were? How can stakehold-ers ever have confidence that it is actually fixed and not patched up for a year? How could this even happen again?
I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear that FAMU football received one of the lowest ever APR ratings from the NCAA, just a year after receiving one of the highest-ever ratings. We toiled through the infamous debacle of 2022 where the academic embarrassment of our university reached national proportions. We saw one of the best teams in the country on the field, put up some of the worst academic performances in school history. The national champions on the field failed to make the mark in the classroom.
I personally challenged then FAMU President Larry Robinson, Ph.D. to fix it once and for all. That included putting academic people from the university to take a vested interested in supporting the academics department for FAMU Athletics. My reasoning was that they are the ones with expertise in academics, while many folks in athletics had expertise in totally different fields. I still hold firm that the combination of athletics administrators being in charge of an academic area and left to their own deviced has been FAMU’s issue all along. Coupled with lack of a consistent supervisor in athletics, not retaining competent staffers in the academic wing of athletics, and there not being a consistent monitoring sys-tem to oversee these activities throughout the year, FAMU has failed once again and it has no one to blame but the itself.
While the university is in the process of attracting a new president, the FAMU Board of Trustees must step in and do what their job is in establishing policy for the implementation of athletics academic monitoring and advising. This policy must drill down. Unfortunately, if the university administration or athletics administration is not able to come up with a plan, the policy must include all aspects of athletics academic administration.
It must include sending staff to training at NCAA sessions when they are available. It must also include one person that is responsible specifically for football. That person must have the authority of an assistant coach to pull players from practice who are not meeting their academic responsibilities of performance.
Our other sports are doing pretty well, including some perfect or near perfect scores. However, it is completely overshadowed by the continued failures in football.
There needs to be a monthly meeting with all of these academic staffers to dive deep in-to progress throughout the semester. Additionally, there must be buy in from the faculty of the university like it is at other schools. When the registrar marks students as athletes, each professor must be made aware of that. As a part of their tasks, they should be asked to re-port weekly on attendance and performance of the athletes in their classes. This is the model used by larger institutions to have up-to-date information on their student-athletes, which can be monitored at all times.
This will allow intervention during the semester and do away with the surprise of waiting until the end of the semester to find out what is going on. At that point there is no ability to intervene in correcting the situation. Additionally, academic staff must hold priority over the coaches to sit players out if they are not performing up to baseline academic standards and attendance set forth by the athletics academic conglomerate.
Unless we are satisfied with continuing to fail in athletics academics, this type of inter-vention must happen immediately. When the issue of 2022 happened, I personally chal-lenged Robinson to fix the issue. With a team led by then Provost Dr. Maurice Edington, it was fixed. Unfortunately, the system was not effective with a change in personnel. The re-vised system must take into account the possibility of turnover in athletics or in depart-ments at the university itself.
This time, I must ask the FAMU Board of Trustees to make it a university policy for the oversight of academics in athletics. They should have both Vice President of Athletics An-gela Suggs and FAMU Provost Dr. Allyson Watson in on developing this system. It is worth the resources to hire a competent consultant with a proven track record of success to ad-dress these issues to be in the mix as well. Having an outside consultant will be key to fixing this issue for sustainability.
This can not be left to persons who are presently in charge, because if they leave things could be different. By making it a policy enforceable by the FAMU Board of Trustees, there can be no excuse for failure in athletic academics again.