With the Division I men’s and women’s basketball championships in full swing, Appalachian State Faculty Athletics Representative Alan Hauser took time to answer a few questions about the academic success of Division I student-athletes, academic reform and the role of the FAR. Hauser, whose long service to the NCAA includes stints on the Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet and the Division I Management Council, is a biblical studies professor who became FAR in 1986. His term as president of the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association will end in November.

How do we focus more on the student side of student-athlete?

One thing that often gets lost in focusing on student-athletes as athletes is how they have to be so good at time management. If you have a lot of practices, games and away trips, you’ve got to manage your time very efficiently. Most student-athletes do that very well. That’s not to say that there aren’t some who are struggling, but there are so many who do well academically. Sometimes they get lost in the media. We don’t tend to focus on the quality work of most student-athletes. I have been a faculty rep since 1986, and I have seen countless cases in which student-athletes have excelled off the field. They don’t go professional in sports. They become doctors, teachers and lawyers – and do extremely well.

How do you think academic reform is progressing?

NCAA President Myles Brand should be commended for his leadership in advancing academic reform. Student-athletes need to be student-athletes. We can help ensure that by admitting to our institutions student-athletes who are academically well-qualified. There’s nothing worse than having a student-athlete come in for a couple of years and then leave the institution because they couldn’t do the academic work. Often overlooked is monitoring the performance of the student-athletes while they are at an institution. The Academic Progress Rate has done an excellent job of doing just that. Yes, we have things we still have to work out. But one spinoff of the APR is that we’re doing things more carefully, especially in those sports in which the numbers demonstrate the need for improved academic performance.

Are there any changes you’d like to see in academic reform?

There are cases where teams or coaches are unduly penalized when perhaps some student-athletes may have a legitimate reason for leaving an institution. We’re taking serious steps to alleviate those types of situations. Much of the negativity toward the APR comes from people who don’t remember that we’re doing the best we can to make allowances for specific instances gradually. No system is perfect when you put it in place, but there has been some fine tuning that will help the APR be more fair. Also, there’s a perception of the APR structure that I would like to change – while the structure comes with penalties, nobody involved with developing that structure wants the system simply to be punitive; rather, it is meant to help our coaches, teams, administrators and student-athletes be more focused on academics. By and large, the academic reform movement has done just that. Yes, it needs fine-tuning, but I’d say it’s been a very large success.

In the last issue of FARA’s newsletter, the FARA Voice, you wrote about the partnership between the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics and the NCAA to provide educational initiatives to bolster understanding of and strategies for improving an institution’s APR. Why do you think those activities are important?

Because they provide ways for both conferences and institutions to look closely at what they can do to improve how they deal with the academic well-being of their student-athletes. The sessions are very well done and provide a lot of potential to help institutions improve what they are doing and to get some serious help in analyzing where they need to make changes.

What is the most important job of an FAR?

Ensuring the academic well-being of student-athletes. And when I say ensure, I don’t mean that you can go out and talk to 462 students – nobody can do that. But make sure that the way coaches recruit, the way in which athletics departments encourage coaches to interact with their players, the way academic support services are set up, the way in which initial eligibility and continuing eligibility is monitored and all those areas the faculty rep needs to be closely involved – make sure that these opportunities are maximized to ensure the academic well-being of student-athletes. Supporting the academic well-being of student-athletes is the most critical thing an FAR can do.

What are the primary challenges in that regard?

One of the things I’ve found rewarding my last few years as a faculty rep is that our coaches are saying, ‘Well, I’m interested in (recruiting) this one person, but I don’t know if they’re going to do well here or it will take a lot of extra effort to get them to do well. Maybe that’s somebody I really shouldn’t be recruiting. Maybe there’s another institution where they can do well.’ That is a significant shift, in my opinion. In the recruiting process, there has to be a fit on a lot of different levels, and one of those is academics. The coaches on my campus at least have begun to look carefully at attracting student-athletes who, taking a number of things into account, are a good fit for the institution and for their team.

Why are you an FAR?

The chair of our faculty senate sits on the athletics council, and I was chair of the faculty senate for several years. That’s how I became involved in athletics. Little by little, year by year, my involvement and interest grew. I have so thoroughly enjoyed working with the student-athletes, the coaches and administrators. I’ve done a lot of things with the NCAA, too. I just continue to be impressed with the quality of people I meet all around, from the student-athletes up to Myles Brand and everywhere in between. They are fine people who do indeed have the best interests of the student-athletes in mind. If you ask me 10 years after I quit being faculty rep what I remember most about being faculty rep, hopefully it’s that I had at least a tiny bit of a role to play in helping to improve the chances for academic success of our student-athletes.