No Call for Academic Awareness

Colleague Max Utsler of Kansas alerted us to an interesting story. It seems the NCAA wanted to host a conference of leading sports academicians to present research papers related to the NCAA and college athletics. But the conference was cancelled. Myles Brand of the NCAA said it was because the research papers were not of "sufficient quality." However, several academicians say the real problem was that the research papers were critical of the NCAA.

Make up your own mind by checking out the story at the Inside Higher Education website. Keep on reading down to the bottom for some of the comments submitted by researchers. Richard Southall of the University of Memphis (and a JSM contributor/reviewer) says he might try to organize and host a similar conference, if anyone is interested in helping.

And by the way, did anyone out there know about this conference or the call for papers? I really feel in the dark because this is the first I had heard of it.