To the Editor:

Gerald S. Gurney's commentary piece "Now We Must Reform Athletics Reform" (The Chronicle, October 23) argues that academic reform in college athletics should include raising preparedness standards (and hence reducing the number of at-risk athletes), reducing the clustering of academic majors in undemanding courses, and establishing consistent, transparent, and meaningful NCAA penalties for poor academic performance.

These reform measures are no better than the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Academic Progress Rate and its newest progeny, the Coaches' Academic Progress Rate. Touted as meaningful measures of academic achievement, they reveal nothing about the quality and rigor of an athlete's education. In fact, they have increased the pressure to choose eligibility over education for the athlete.

Higher-education administrators are not particularly good at connecting the dots involved in academic fraud. To do so would be to acknowledge their complicity in the ongoing hypocrisy. If the academy was serious about providing an effective remedy for academic corruption in college sports, it would choose disclosure, transparency, and truth telling. Academic fraud begins and ends with faculty members who are sympathetic to athletes and sports programs on their campuses. For courses taken by members of sports teams, universities should make public the names of professors, along with their course titles and course GPA's.

University presidents will argue that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prevents disclosure of this information. They will further claim that they are protecting the privacy of students. Disclosure is not about student behavior; it is about faculty behavior; it is about fraudulent institutional behavior. Indeed, the law permits making public academic records of student groups sufficient in number to protect the privacy of individual students.

Simply put: No disclosure, no reform.

Bruce B. Svare
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
State University of New York
Albany, N.Y.