The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics hosted over 130 representatives from colleges all over the country to discuss the balance between intercollegiate sports and academics, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported Tuesday. Participants in the national forum, allegedly the first dedicated to the topic, addressed the relationship between professors and coaches, whether professors should be involved with sports programs and ways in which campuses with prestigious athletics could maintain high academic standards. While some faculty members argued that professors should deem athletics a complement to education in the classroom, a Knight Commission survey of over 2,000 faculty members at Divison I-A schools found that professors ranked athletics 12th out of 13th in terms of overall priority. "The faculty is not going to be allowed to do anything that interferes with the success of these big-time programs," Gary R. Roberts, dean of the Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis, told the Chronicle.
The University of Missouri recently contacted 223 graduate school applicants to tell them that their acceptance letters had been mailed by mistake. According to the Columbia Tribune, the error involved 15 of the school's graduate programs sending acceptance e-mails on Sept. 27, which were retracted in a follow-up e-mail sent Sept. 28. The Tribune reported that the second letter from Terrence Grus, the director of graduate admissions, said, "We apologize for this error and for any inconvenience this may have caused." In an e-mail to the Tribune, Grus blamed the error on a technical glitch.
Wall Street star Shane Wallace '91 died of brain cancer in Greenwich, Conn., on Oct. 9. Wallace, whose talent as an intern at JPMorgan enabled him to join the firm straight out of college, was head of JPMorgan Chase's telecommunications mergers and acquisitions group at the time of his death. He previously served as head of JPMorgan's West Coast technology M&A sector and chairman of the valuation and fairness committee. "If you are a superstar like Shane, the investment banks want you to stay on after your time as an analyst and not go to business school," Robert Kindler, vice chairman of Morgan Stanley said, according to CNN.com. Wallace advised telecom giants such as Verizon Communications and Sprint on several high-profile mergers. While ill this year, he successfully managed Alltel's recent $27 billion deal to go private, a milestone in the telecom sector.
