Athlete-friendly curriculum?

Too much info to paste.

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The new batch of data was unambiguous. Half of the students in one major were athletes. One in three black players on Auburn’s football team was enrolled in the program.

Rather than question how this might have happened, the university’s provost instead offered a plan: Create more programs like it.

"The following report points to the need for more majors that have enough elective courses etc.," Timothy R. Boosinger, the provost at the time, wrote in the late winter of 2015 to G. Jay Gogue, who was then the president. So many athletes concentrated in one major — public administration — can attract controversy, and it did. Offering more programs with similarly flexible requirements would, Boosinger implied, solve the problem.

The provost assured the president that those other programs were in the works, and that he had met with Jay Jacobs, who was then the athletic director, "to discuss the new offerings that are in the pipeline."



An internal investigation of public administration found that, in the fall of 2014, 37 percent of Auburn’s black male athletes were enrolled in the major.

At the same time, scarcely any black male students who were not athletes — just two of 581 — majored in the program.


The Auburn data are clear: Public administration was not a major broadly pursued by African-American students. It was a major disproportionately popular with a specific set of African-American men who played sports.


The Chronicle obtained materials from Auburn’s internal review of grade distributions. While it may not have identified evidence of favoritism toward athletes, the review examined numerous course sections where the passage rates for all students reached 100 percent. In a 4000-level class geared toward seniors, an instructor awarded A’s or B’s to 90 percent or more of his students across four different sections.