CMU does special favors for athletes. Quick Someone Call the Ann Arbor News!!!

Submitted by mbrummer on

Nice article on Espn from Mark Schlabach, detailing how CMU and Dan Levour are going to prepare for their game versus Georgia this week.

 

In the article Schlabach tails Levour for the entire week. He follows him to his classes, the first one he mentions is this:

"Tuesday, 11 a.m., Billiards Class


LeFevour takes his position near a pool table in the Student Athletic Center, which is known as "SAC" on the CMU campus. For the next 45 minutes, LeFevour practices breaking balls on the felt-covered table. The class is taught by a graduate assistant coach on the school's softball team. She carries a textbook entitled "Precision Pool," apparently teaching as she learns."

So apparently CMU not only has classes designed for football players to take, not only are they not taught by real professors, but by other people in the athletic department, who are learning as they go along, Who wants to bet that normal students are allowed to take this class?

How you feel about academic integrity now. Of course if the Ann Arbor News had this on Umich it would take 4 days of front page news, when other schools do it, it's mainly filler information in a fluff piece.

Basically the whole summer the Ann Arbor News held us hostage saying it was going to bomb the Michigan Programs, however it was things that not only occur at big time programs such as Michigan, but small time as well!!

To be fair, the article also mentions him taking a Yoga class and says that he is on track to graduate in interpersonal communication, you know instead of just personal communication, which I geuss is just communication with yourself or extraterrestial comminication. I don't know how Yoga and Billiards help you get there, but I digress.

"I took all that algebra and calculus when I was a freshman," LeFevour said.

As a math teacher and former engineering grad, I find this dubious. For two reasons, for his major it is doubtful that he needed calculus even with the focus in insurance. Very few people take calculus for fun. Second, if he did take algebra in college, which is quite possible , he would at least have to take some other classes such as trignometry, or geometry before he could even attempt calculus. Possibly, he took stats.

Again, I'm not belittling Lefour or CMU just pointing out the double standard. How one media source's fluff, is another's hard hitting atom bomb news.

Good luck to CMU with their game on Saturday, and I wish Lefour was in the maize in blue.

 

Comments

mbrummer

September 5th, 2008 at 9:42 PM ^

Your right  I didn't throughly check, but after surfing the CMU site and not finding it listed I made an assumption.

I should have said "Who wants to bet that 95% of the enrollment in this class are athletes."

 My mistake

I also like to repeat I'm not ripping the CMU program, its just business as usual for most Division 1 football schools from CMU, UMICH, LSU, Stanford, and Notre  Dame, yet Michigan was lambasted unfairly in the Ann Arbor News.

 

tigersjunkie

September 5th, 2008 at 11:44 PM ^

Athletes are allowed to sign up for classes before any of the other students. It doesn't matter if the class is open to all students at the university, if an athlete wants to get into a class then he is in the class. Classes fill up with athletes because they get first dibs. The bottom line is that this happens at every university.

bdubya

September 6th, 2008 at 12:22 AM ^

Yeah it's open to everyone, I almost took it a few years ago. I decided to take a real class instead and added bowling. That class was also taught by a student who had no idea what was going on.

hotcarlweathers

September 6th, 2008 at 11:02 AM ^

As a CMU student...I can tell you that

1. Billiards and yoga are one credit elective classes that are open to all students and taking at least ONE elective credit in physical education is required for graduation. So what if Dan wants to pay an extra $600 out of his pocket to take any variation of these courses such as judo, racquetball, disc golf, snowboarding god knows how many others there are?

2. Calculus (or a variation thereof) is a requirement to graduate at CMU. We have what is called the "University Program", a pick-and-choose set out of various groups of gen.ed. courses that must be fulfilled by the end of your sophomore year. One of these sections that must be fulfilled is mathematically oriented. A course that can fulfill the math requirement is..*gasp* calculus.

And now for your comment about classes not being taught by professors. CMU has a huge athletic training and sports medicine program. What better way to give students sports-related experience than to let them teach or assist in lower-level sports courses? You're really going to complain about a one-credit phys.ed. elective not being taught by an actual professor? How about we just mosey on down to little brother and have a 500 person lecture taught by a 23 year old TA?

Sorry for the ranting nature, but think before you assume next time. Go Blue and Fire up Chips!