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Monday, December 8, 2008
Unfortunately, Jan Kemp’s impact fading
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charles Knapp had read about the trial and had a sense of the hangover on campus. But it took an impromptu meeting with Georgia’s most famous English instructor to bring inglorious history back into focus.
“It was one of the first times I was at the university,” Knapp, the former Georgia president, said Monday. “I was giving a talk to the faculty, and a number of people came forward when it was over. I remember the line moving up and a bunch of photographers suddenly moving into position. Then a lady comes up and extends her hand and an entire bank of flashbulbs went off. I just laughed and said, ‘You must be Jan Kemp.’ “
This was in 1988, two years after Kemp sued Georgia for wrongful termination and exposed academic irregularities regarding student-athletes.
UGA wasn’t the only campus where the athletic department’s footprint mutated far beyond its ideal size. But the Kemp suit was clear and tangible. It was something people could touch and feel and debate. It became talking point on all matters related to reforming college athletics.
Jan Kemp died of complications from Alzheimer’s at the too young age of 59. She passed knowing that she helped affect change at Georgia and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that change now looks like a small clean spot on a greasy factory floor.
An army of Jan Kemps wouldn’t make a difference today. Whistleblowers may catch the occasional corrupt academic counselor, or the football coach whose car keys somehow keep winding up in a recruit’s pocket.
But today’s problems dwarf those of two decades ago. They’re created by hypocritical college presidents who preach academics one day and yield to a booster’s whims to fire the football coach the next. They say yes to 12-game regular seasons, conference championship games and late-night bowl kickoffs and basketball tournament tipoffs — but no to a football playoff because it “sends the wrong message.”
Jan Kemp had the right idea at the right time. But the issues were simpler in the 1980s and barely applicable today. It’s like dropping an expert on eight-track technology into a digital world.
“The days of the $50 handshake and the grade-changing — there’s a thousand ways to keep an eye on those things now,” said Knapp, who came from Tulane following the resignation of president Fred Davison and an interim term by Henry King Stanford. “The battlefield has changed. The amount of money involved with everything from coaches salaries to advertising and BCS bowls — it’s really accelerated everything.
“In my days, the question was, ‘What are our minimum academic standards for athletes?’ Now I hear less and less about those standards. It’s about the trajectory of athletics in the face of so much money. It’s college presidents talking about trying to maintain some semblance of amateurism. I remember when there was no advertising at Sanford Stadium. We had a long discussion about putting up two itsy-bitsy signs on the scoreboard, one for Coke and one for Delta. We had all this hand wringing over the issue before we decided to do it. Now you go into the stadium and it looks like a video arcade.”
There is nothing wrong with making money. The problem is, making money surpassed a university’s primary’s mission long ago.
Kemp was the voice that screamed, “We’ve lost control. Priorities are out of whack.”
Georgia listened then. It implemented changes. But in the big picture, nobody listened. Or nobody cared.
We should have known what really mattered. The Bulldogs were giving football scholarships to non-qualifiers because of their size, speed and strength. This was reaffirmed when Kemp’s superior, Leroy Ervin, was secretly taped at a faculty meeting, saying recruits were “used as kind of a raw material in the production of some goods to be sold as whatever product, and they get nothing in return.”
There was the dreaded opening statement by the school’s attorney, Hale Almand, who acknowledged: “We may not make a university student out of him, but if we teach him to read and write, maybe he can work at the post office rather than as a garbage man …”
So much for the mission statement.
Kemp won her suit. She eventually returned to teaching. Some on campus saw her as a pariah, others as a savior.
“If you view it through a sports scope, there was some sense of killing the messenger,” Knapp said.
Today, unfortunately, the message has been lost.
More on Jan Kemp: Obit • Photos • Guestbook
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