UNC Faculty Craft 'Statement of Principles for Athletics'

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The University of North Carolina today released "A statement of principles for athletics at UNC," the result of months of informal collaboration among faculty members on the Chapel Hill campus. The statement comes in response to a football scandal involving both academics and contact with agents that led to the suspension of more than a dozen players last season and the firing last summer of head coach Butch Davis. It was the biggest setback for the university's athletic department in a half-century, and the school still awaits sanctions from the NCAA, which wasn't satisfied last fall with UNC's offer of a $50,000 fine, surrender of nine scholarships and two years probation.

"We hope that this statement can provide a point of departure for public discussion and a foundation that the athletic program and the university as a whole can build on in the months and years ahead," Jay Smith, associate chair of history, says in the release. So far, 112 UNC faculty members have endorsed the statement, while others have maintained their distance, according to Richard Southall, director of UNC's College Sport Research Institute. "It's not a petition. It's not any demand. It's not meant to criticize athletics," Southall says. "It's like, 'Hey, let's just have a conversation about these.' These might be some principles that we can use to look to see what we're doing."

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