Apr. 8, 2015 COLUMBIA, S.C. — Murray Sperber, who has written extensively for decades about problems related to athletics at U.S. colleges, will be awarded the Drake Group’s highest honor, the Robert Maynard Hutchins Award on April 22. Sperber, an outspoken critic of basketball coach Bobby Knight and an ardent defender of academic integrity for … Read more
Over a year ago, a team of experts with close affiliations with the Drake Group approached the Drake Group executive committee to get its approval to begin work on a piece of Federal Legislation called the College Athlete Protection Act (CAP Act). The executive committee approved a final draft of the bill in November and … Read more
April 3, 2014 West Haven, Conn. — A professor who specializes in early modern French history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and played a significant role in exposing the biggest academic/athletic scandals at an American university will be awarded the Drake Group’s highest honor on Thursday, April 24, at noon. Jay … Read more
The revised Form 990, “Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax,” filed by many public charities and other exempt organizations, has the potential to fully expose the Achilles’ Heel of the NCAA and its member institutions – the extremely weak, if any, educational basis for the current financial structure of big-time college sports. This would … Read more
Absent an antitrust exemption, which only the Congress can provide, the NCAA will continue to be the target of antitrust lawsuits whenever it tries to implement educationally defensible reforms that have commercial consequences.
Our goal in this report is to provide information on whether NCAA restrictions on athletes’ free participation in the lucrative market for their images, likenesses and names is necessary either to uphold the principles of amateurism or to preserve the activity of intercollegiate athletics. The Drake Group is a national organization of faculty and others, … Read more
The Drake Group, an organization of faculty and staff who seek to defend academic integrity in college sports is now “in residence” at the University of New Haven. The Drake Group was founded in 1999 when a distinguished group of college faculty, authors, and activists were invited to Drake University for a twenty-four-hour think tank … Read more
In 2004, several members of the Drake Group carried picket signs on the sidewalk in front of the Hyatt Hotel in San Antonio where the basketball coaches were staying during the Final Four. Liz Clarke from the Washington Post described the Drake members as “graying university professors trying to sell something radical. The product they’re … Read more
As a reading specialist at UNC-Chapel Hill, Mary Willingham met athletes who told her they had never read a book and didn’t know what a paragraph was. She said she saw diagnostic tests that showed they were unable to do college-level work. But many of those athletes stayed eligible to play sports, she said, because … Read more
Dr. Fritz Polite, a clinical professor of sport management at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) and his co-editor Dr. Billy Hawkins from the University of Georgia have completed a book titled Sport, Race, Activism, and Social Change: The Impact of Dr. Harry Edwards’ Scholarship and Service (University Readers: Cognella Publishers, 2011). According to Polite, a … Read more