College Athletics Panel Discussion Open to Public

Posted on Feb. 2, 2012

Three prominent critics of collegiate sports will discuss “Big-Time College Sports: What Needs to Change?” during a panel presentation Feb. 28 on the UNC campus. The free public program will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Sonja Haynes Stone Center Theater.

The panel will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Taylor Branch ’68, UNC President Emeritus William C. Friday ’48 (LLB) and Charles T. Clotfelter, author and professor at Duke University. Author Will Blythe ’79 will moderate.

Branch’s article “The Shame of College Sports” appeared last year in The Atlantic magazine. Branch’s books include The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President and studies of the American Civil Rights movement, including a three-volume study of Martin Luther King during the movement. Branch is a Morehead-Cain Alumni Visiting Distinguished Professor at UNC during the spring semester.

Friday was a founding co-chair of the Knight Foundation Commission, which was established in 1989 for the purpose of drafting a reform agenda for the administration of intercollegiate sports.

Clotfelter is the Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics and law at Duke. His most recent book is Big-Time Sports in American Universities.

Blythe is a former editor of Esquire magazine. His books include To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, a chronicle of the UNC-Duke basketball rivalry.

The Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Special Collections Library will display archival materials from the papers of Branch and Friday and from the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The collection is sponsoring the program, along with Friends of the Library and the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.

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