Quote:The task force, which began its work in January, interviewed Cal head coaches and asked student-athletes to fill out surveys. Members of the panel made full-day visits to Stanford and UCLA and met with representatives from Harvard and the University of Virginia to compare how those schools address these issues.
I get why they visited UCLA since, as a sister UC school, UCLA has to deal with a lot of the same systemwide admissions issues. And even a meeting with UVa makes some sense. But I would be curious to know what the C.al folks learned from Stanford and Harvard that could actually be implemented at Berkeley.
But more to the point, I have mixed feelings about this whole APR/academic performance issue. On the one hand, I always want Stanford to Beat C.al at everything. On the other hand, C.al athletes who have no chance of making a living playing professional sports drop out of college to do...what exactly? I just can't bring myself to gloat over C.al's--or more specifically, the individual athetes'--misfortunes in this case, and I really hope that they can turn this around.
If there's one thing people have learned in Berkeley, it's that you can't put "Cal football" and "Rose Bowl" in the same sentence. The words just don't fit. You'd be better off linking "covered wagons" with "Mars travel." (Bruce Jenkins, Cal '70, SF Chronicle, Nov. 11, 2017)