TO THE EDITOR:
I was in class the other day, listening to my professor describe an assignment. He emphasized the importance of considering our clients’ backgrounds when writing a letter.
“Remember, these people are bookstore owners — they are probably educated people, they can read … these aren’t college athletes.”
Of course not. What good would it do for us to write to college athletes, when college athletes are all, obviously, illiterate? My professor and a few others laughed. There was no hesitation, no consideration that it was even conceivable that one of these illiterates could have possibly found her way into the law school and be sitting in that room.
Well, guess what? I was a college athlete. I played a varsity sport for four years at UNC. I practiced for hours every day, traveled every weekend and was on two national championship teams. But the real surprise? Not only can I read, I was a Morehead-Cain Scholar.
The ongoing saga of academic impropriety in the student athlete community at Carolina has made the occasional stab at our institution fairly inevitable. People make jokes about the stories they’ve heard, and as boring and uncreative as they are, you just have to laugh them off. But this comment, no doubt the product of a recent CNN story entitled “Some college athletes play like adults, read like fifth graders,” pushed me over the edge.
I could write about how student athletes impressively balance their various commitments, how hard they work and how much most of them appreciate the opportunity to represent the University of North Carolina. But that story has been told, and it falls on deaf ears with an audience that doesn’t value athletics.
So my intent is not to convince you that student-athletes are all great people who contribute a huge amount to the University. I don’t actually care whether you believe that or not.
My intent is to show those who consider themselves open-minded intellectuals that to use the term “college athlete” as a synonym for illiterate only demonstrates your own ignorance. It’s safe to say that my professor meant his comment as a joke, and it’s also pretty safe to say he assumed he was in a room of nonathletes. It was, after all, a law school.
