FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 16, 2000 CONTACT: Jon Ericson, (515) 255-0798, Lisa Lacher, (515) 271-3119 NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR COLLEGE ATHLETIC REFORM TO HOLD CONFERENCE AT DRAKE MARCH 24-25 Drake University will host a conference March 24-25 for faculty members from universities across the country who are determined to devise a proposal to reform collegiate sports. "This conference is for those who are fed up with the corruption, exploitation and hypocrisy in collegiate athletics and are willing to work to end it," said Jon Ericson, conference organizer and the Ellis and Nelle Levitt professor of rhetoric and communication studies at Drake. Ericson conducted a similar conference last October, but the attendees were unable to reach agreement on a reform proposal. They did, however, form a National Alliance for College Athletic Reform and agree to hold another conference: "College Sports Corruption: The Way Out - Round Two." Approximately 25 faculty members are expected to participate in the second conference, which will start at 1:30 p.m. Friday, March 24, in Levitt Hall in Old Main on the Drake campus in Des Moines, Iowa. Saturday's sessions also will take place in Levitt Hall. All sessions are open to the public. Among the participants will be Linda Bensel-Meyers, director of composition in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, where an investigation is under way into allegations of academic fraud and plagiarism in the athletic department. A document Bensel-Meyers sent to the UT Faculty Senate was disclosed last fall as part of an investigation conducted by ESPN.com. That document states that athletes had submitted papers that were either co-written or entirely written by tutors hired by the athletic department. "These athletes," she wrote, "claimed they had been told by their tutors that this sort of intervention was acceptable," and added that "the acts of plagiarism appeared to be institutionally mandated by the athletic department." Bensel-Meyers said she hopes the upcoming conference will result in a "full statement to faculty senates that we need to have academic control over college athletics and the best way to do that is to have all advising and all tutoring overseen by academic offices rather than athletic departments." She said she also favors Ericson's proposal to disclose athletes' academic records. By making scholarship athletes' courses, majors, academic advisers and instructors public record, light would be shined on the educational enterprise of college sports, Ericson said. Grades would remain private, however, he added. "The one consistent element in all of the efforts to clean up college athletics is the refusal to face academic corruption, to expose it," Ericson said. "Exposing the academic corruption is the only solution supporters of the present system fear." Several outspoken critics of collegiate athletics who attended the first Drake conference will be returning for the second round. They include: William Dowling, professor of English at Rutgers University and founder of Rutgers 1,000, a movement to withdraw Rutgers from the Big East conference; Allen Sack, professor of sociology and management at the University of New Haven and co-author of "College Athletes for Hire: the Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA's Amateur Myth." Murray Sperber, professor of English and American studies at Indiana University and author of numerous books on college sports, including "College Sports Inc.: The Athletic Department vs. The University." The results of the conference are scheduled to be posted by noon Monday, March 27, on the World Wide Web at www.drake.edu/events/collegesports/.