Among Haves and Have-Nots in Athletics, One Common Fear: Academic Misconduct

In the gulf between big-time athletics programs and everybody else, there’s seemingly nothing money can’t buy. It’s no secret that colleges in the so-called Power Five conferences can outspend the rest on facilities, coaches, and uniforms, but they may also have an edge in calculus.

Smaller athletics departments lack the resources to build palatial student-services centers, where athletes can get specialized academic help. But rich and poor alike face similar challenges in tutoring athletes: It’s fertile ground for NCAA academic-misconduct violations.

It’s easy to imagine an athletics tutor as an undergraduate pulled from the general enrollment. At Illinois State University, an institution that plays in the smaller Missouri Valley Conference, that picture is accurate. Students who tutor are paid $8.75 an hour, said Jeri Beggs, a professor in the college of business and the liaison between the university and the athletics department. The university provides 70 to 95 hours of tutoring each week to Illinois State athletes, she said.

Squeezing all of those tutors into a single place can be hard, however. Illinois State doesn’t have dedicated space for tutoring, and it certainly doesn’t have a 40,000-square-foot facility surrounded by water, as you would find at the University of Oregon.

“That actually has been a challenge for us on this campus,” said Paul Downey, senior associate athletic director for academics and life skills at Illinois State. “We want everything to happen in our facility, but during the day, our offices are taken by the full-time staff.”

Florida State University has more than 8,000 square feet of study-hall and tutoring space at the Coyle E. Moore Athletics Center. It’s something officials show off to visiting recruits, said Kathryn (Kacy) King, associate athletic director for academic services at Florida State. Athletes at the university might get an undergraduate as a tutor, but that’s not the athletics department’s preference.

“We try to hire graduate-level students, because we trust them more to abide by the rules,” said Jessica Francis, assistant director of educational services and tutor coordinator.

A graduate student can make $11 an hour tutoring Florida State athletes — $2 an hour more than the base level pay, according to Ms. King. Tutors with Ph.D.s can earn $15 an hour.

A ‘Family Tradition’

But not every athlete at Florida State gets a graduate student as a tutor. Some get professional tutors who played college sports themselves.

“It’s a good thing to do to keep me busy in retirement,” said John Root, a tutor at Florida State and former football player at Stanford University. “It’s fun, too, keeping the contact with the student-athletes, because it’s something I’ve been a part of all my life.”

Mr. Root’s father was a Division I athlete and coach, and both of his sons played college football, so he thinks of tutoring and playing as a “family tradition.” He started at Florida State by helping his son, Matt Root, with mathematics about 15 years ago. The athletics department later asked him to stay on as a math tutor. That was just after Florida State’s 2007 tutoring scandal, which demonstrates another difference between the attention paid to tutors at Florida State compared with Illinois State.

Ms. King said her athletics department knows it’s in the national spotlight and still feels the effects of that scandal.

“It’s not even that we feel it, the campus still feels it, and there’s an expectation from the vice presidents and above that we are going to have a program where integrity is at the core,” Ms. King said.

That, Ms. Francis explained, is why they aim to use graduate students as tutors. “We’ll tell them right off the bat, We almost don’t care what you know. The question is: Can you be trusted? You can come in here with a doctorate degree and be top in your class, but if we can’t trust you, we don’t need you,” she said.

Some of Florida State’s amenities can also be safeguards against improprieties. When prospective athletes visit, Ms. King said, they are shown the individual tutoring rooms. While such facilities might tip the scales for a recruit, they also make it easier to ensure that tutors don’t violate academic-integrity rules because full-time monitors can observe tutoring sessions.

That’s not the case at Illinois State, where Ms. Beggs said it “would be impossible to monitor everything that’s going on.” Even the system of scheduling tutors illustrates the divide between the haves and have-nots. Florida State uses a tutor-coordinating software called GradesFirst, and so did Illinois State, Mr. Downey said, until the price went up.

‘A Brighter Line’

Illinois State is unlikely to appear in the next ignominious NCAA headline. It’s in a lower-ranked conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and it deals with fewer athletes and a dimmer spotlight. Travel schedules also present different challenges for the institutions. At Florida State, Ms. Francis said, “We have one team who’s about to leave today, and might possibly be gone for the next two weeks.”

Mr. Downey said Illinois State athletes rarely encounter that problem. “We don’t miss a lot of class here. A lot of things are fairly local here in the Missouri Valley Conference,” he said.

Academic misconduct is the biggest conversation in tutoring circles, said Ms. Beggs, who is also president of the Faculty Athletic Representative Association’s executive committee.

“Especially over time, it would be easy for a tutor to give an athlete more assistance,” Ms. Beggs said. That’s why they try to “create a brighter line between what’s right and what’s wrong. But obviously it’s the monitoring afterwards that’s a challenge.”

They draw that line early on by explaining to tutors why certain scenarios could be troublesome. Florida State officials use a similar strategy, but they pull out all the stops for it. Even the president of the university attends.

“We do a very good job of scaring the tutors in the beginning,” Ms. King said, adding that tutors regularly contact the department if anything borders on impropriety, such as an athlete accidentally contacting them personally.

Mr. Root, the retiree, said it was apparent, after the 2007 scandal, that Florida State was trying to avoid past mistakes. “It was very strict. We would have conferences at the beginning, and we were told, ‘I never want to go through this again,’” Mr. Root said. “We were certainly made very aware of the problems, and part of our job was to help the university avoid those problems in the future.”

Those are among the steps required to avoid being the next college-athletics scandal. Another one, Ms. King said, is particularly pertinent at this time of year. She warns all of her tutors not to compete for money in March Madness pools. It’s a warning she has to issue so regularly that some of her former tutors still remember it.

“I’m still friends with one of the people who tutored for me, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s that time of the year where Kacy King would scare the crap out of me,’” she recalled. “Because I really take it seriously, and I will fire you.”