As the University of North Carolina debates whether to do criminal background checks on all incoming students, Baylor University has decided to run such checks on all student-athletes transferring to this school (additionally, all entering student-athletes will be required to provide character references). UNC is considering the new policy in light of recent events at the school: this spring two students who lied on their applications about whether they had criminal records murdered two other students. Baylor is motivated by similar concerns: last summer, a Baylor basketball player was shot to death; a teammate now awaits trial for murder. Both the alleged murderer and the victim were transfer students. Baylor's investigation of the crime also revealed an extremely dirty basketball program in which players did drugs while administrators looked the other way, failed drug tests that administrators never reported, and accepted payments in violation of NCAA rules. As part of its cleanup operation, Baylor has bid farewell to the corrupt coach who oversaw the program's infractions and who also attempted to interfere with the murder investigation.

Both the victim and the alleged murderer were black, as are most of Baylor's student athletes. The Baylor student body is mostly white. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2000, while less than five per cent of the Baylor student body was black, more than half the football and basketball teams were black; one out of four black men on Baylor's campus was a scholarship athlete. Singling out transferring athletes, most of whom will be black men, for background checks leaves Baylor wide open to the charge of discrimination--people may rightly suggest that the new rule is a way of allowing the school to single out for particular scrutiny black men who want to enroll at Baylor, that as such it presumes that black male students are predisposed to commit crimes, and that it thus amounts to a form of racial profiling. It would be both more politic and more rational to conduct such checks on all new students.

The question that often gets unasked is why should the national university system, subsidized by taxpayers and those paying for their children to go to college, serve as a farm team system for the NBA and the NFL?

The sooner we detatch premium college sports (those where the university regularly makes money off of its "students" playing the sport) the sooner we'll be one step closer to a better university system.

I used to work at Baylor. About a year and a half ago, a freshman was arrested and is now awaiting charges that he stabbed his parents and brother to death, and then burned down the house they were in.

I don't believe he had a record going in to Baylor. His case leads me to believe, though, that the problems aren't just with the athletic department.

I was there when the brouhaha with the men's basketball program erupted. In my opinion, coaches should be subject to background checks as well. It's amazing what came up after Coach Bliss resigned.

"The sooner we detatch premium college sports (those where the university regularly makes money off of its "students" playing the sport) the sooner we'll be one step closer to a better university system."

I believe that SUNY Buffalo did just that back in the early 70s, when they got rid of their first division football team, through the lobbying of the faculty. From the story I have heard, it seems that football was the only sport so targeted at this school. I am sorry I don't know much more about it than this, but I do know this school has been working its tail off to bring the football team back from the dead. I am not sure there have been any reports on how this affected the quality of the campus or student life, but in any case, it might be an interesting study.

Just as it would be more "more politic and more rational" to search every airline passenger (sleeping grandparents, toddlers, nuns, etc.) than to focus on those people who are most likely (read: "young, male, muslims"), based on precedent, to threaten airline safety. It is indeed an odd sort of rationality that assumes that investigative resources are infinite and cost-free and can thus be squandered, and which also refuses to learn from past experience. Perhaps this method, greeting each day and experience with the "tabula rasa" of an infant gives one a frisson of innocence and a thrill of discovery, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with "learning". IMHO, it makes sense for Baylor to focus its resources where it can get the most "bang for the buck"...

Question concerning Baylor is that if the disciplinary and criminal problems are mostly with the student athletes and the student athletes are most of the black students, then why would it be concerned racist to spend most of the time investigating the student athletes? It seems to me that if you have a case where whites cause most of the problems, then spending most of the money investigating the whites would be the thing to do and that would not be racist. The same would hold true if it were blacks or Asians or Arabs or whatever group it is. You put the resources to halt problems where the problems exist, regardless of the race. That does not make it racism.

Well, in University systems generally, once anyone calls you 'racist', you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent. The deck is well and truly loaded against the practical measure of applying resources to the sub-populations where the problems mostly occur - as long as those sub-populations contain significant numbers of 'protected' minorities.

I love your post name. I would like to borrow it at times because I also am insufficiently sensitive.

I think that if your problems walk like a duck, quack like a duck, act like a duck, look like a duck, then you should be putting your resources to investigating ducks. To do otherwise is to be unresponsive to your responsibilities to the general population.

You are right, it would be more "politic", but I'm less sure that it would be more "rational", e.g. in the case resources are limited. Then it makes logical sense to concentrate attention on members of groups that are statistically more likely to have a criminal background. Which is not the same as predisposition, although such an argument can be made, albeit on a different (genetic, technical) empirical basis.

Oh, swell. Do you suppose that US News & World Report is going to add "lowest percentage of pre-matriculationcriminal convictions" to the college ranking criteria?

The whole notion that background checks on transfers will be bad for black students there because of their overrepresentation is mathematical nonsense. Surely more black students apply than are accepted, right? Background checks on transferring athletes most likely will result only in WHICH black athletes get the scholarships, not HOW MANY ones do. The sports teams have fixed rosters to fill.

Please email me more information about conducting background checks on college athletes. This is for my class. Thank you

Donnie Carter