Everyone knows that recently adopted eligibility criteria in Division I will impact prospective student-athletes and the coaches who recruit them, but not everyone realizes the impact the new regulations will have on faculty athletics representatives as well.

The new legislation is directed at changing the culture of how student-athletes are recruited and how institutions strive to maintain their academic eligibility. The regulations potentially will admit lesser qualified student-athletes to our institutions, yet require them to adhere to stricter progress-toward-degree requirements. Coaches are expected to divine which marginal student-athletes will respond best to the higher education environment, an environment that will place more demands on the time and intellect of an athlete than ever before.

The new regulations also will require FARs to exercise even greater vigilance than we currently do. The stakes have ratcheted up increasingly, especially at Division I-A institutions, but do not assume that Divisions II and III are immune from pressures.

To be sure, the stakes -- and hence the pressures -- are much higher today and they not only affect intercollegiate athletics, but they infect it as well. There has been much hand-wringing over the decades and many cries for reform, but the juggernaut keeps rolling along. What can we do?

First, as FARs, we must place the academic integrity of intercollegiate athletics as our top priority because, platitudes aside, if we don't, who will? What this means practically is that we must work closely with registrars, admissions officers, athletics department staff, and, above all -- especially considering the new academic regulations -- with athletics academic support services. We must ensure that those services report to the provost or his or her designee in academic affairs. They should not in the least be connected to or affiliated with athletics. In this instance, appearances count, and the opportunities for stretching the new rules should be less likely if academic advisors are not subject to evaluation by athletics department personnel.

Second, we must work with coaches and athletics department personnel to ensure that their academic expectations for student-athletes facilitate adherence to the new progress-toward-degree requirements.

Third, we must insist upon public disclosure of student-athlete majors to ensure that academically marginal student-athletes are not warehoused in "easy" programs designed to maintain their athletics eligibility but not their intellectual capacity. I realize that such monitoring gets us into the potentially dangerous territory of evaluating faculty colleagues in other departments, but all universities constantly evaluate programs, as do accrediting agencies, so such scrutiny is well within the bounds of accepted academic procedures.

The mere fact that we have strengthened progress-toward-degree requirements, thereby enhancing the likelihood of graduation, does not automatically imply that we have educated a young man or young woman.

Fourth, we must work closely with our athletics department colleagues to ensure that coaches place realistic time demands on student-athletes. If there is one consistent complaint I hear from student-athletes, it is that the time spent working on their sport, in preparation, travel and competition, has increased to the point that academic performance suffers.

Fifth, I am especially concerned at the lack of a faculty voice as we move to the next phase of academic legislation -- the incentives/disincentives package. Given the current governance structure in Division I, we must keep our CEOs as educated as possible on those and related issues.

One of the things I have discovered in my conference is that many of the CEOs do not know specifically what FARs do or even that the NCAA cares what we do. They often are surprised to learn the range of our responsibilities and sometimes are alarmed to find out that the NCAA not only encourages our involvement in enforcing Association legislation but requires it. In the final analysis, we can only maintain academic integrity if we have the active support and leadership of our CEOs.

Finally, as FARs we must do a better job of connecting with our student-athletes, supporting their endeavors and promoting their academic accomplishments on our campuses and to our colleagues. Last June, I had the privilege of participating in the NCAA Leadership Conference. I met hundreds of student-athletes from across the country, representing institutions of every size and affiliation. Any parent would be proud of any of these young men and women. When I talked with them, I was not especially surprised that many did not know the name of their FAR. Much more surprising was the fact that a good portion of these finest of the fine student-athletes did not know such an entity existed on their campuses.

If we have failed as FARs in any category, we have failed to make student-athletes our own students as much as students who enroll in our classes are our students. We are the neutral parties who can and should help a student-athlete concerned about the repercussions of going to a coach or an athletics administrator with a complaint or a problem. And we are the individuals who should promote their academic achievements on our campuses and in our conferences. We need, in short, to make a big deal about these fine people.

I often hear complaints from fellow FARs that it's only the bad student-athletes who receive the publicity; the 99 percent of the student-athletes who are good, even great, citizens of our institutions are virtually ignored by the media.

Part of this is our fault; we need to do a better job on our campuses. By promoting and rewarding academic achievement, we hope that such role models and such publicity will inspire all student-athletes to achieve in the classroom as well as on the field of competition. That might sound like a pie-in-the-sky prognostication, but peer pressure and role models are major motivators of young people.

In the end, they, along with our faculty colleagues, will be our greatest allies in maintaining the academic integrity of the intercollegiate athletic enterprise, and, ultimately, of our institutions as well.

David Goldfield is the faculty athletics representative at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and past president of the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association.