The University’s policy of giving student athletes priority during preregistration has placed strain on the Women and Gender Studies program, according to professors and students whose classes are comprised largely of student athletes who will not go on to engage in further study in the field. This high enrollment comes at the expense of potential majors and minors.
In December, the program’s steering committee discussed the problems created by this priority registration policy. Previously, concerns raised by the Women and Gender Studies program led to the implementation of a registration policy that no more than 50 percent of a class may be composed of athletes. According to Bonnie Morris, an adjunct professor who teaches a course titled “Athletics and Gender,” this policy came with an unofficial promise from the University to the Women and Gender Studies program that no more than four or five of those students would be from a single team.
D. Scott Heath, Registrar for Athletic Eligibility, Veterans’ Affairs, and Certification, said that athletes are given priority during preregistration to accommodate their rigorous schedules. The Women and Gender Studies program, he said, is the most popular for athletes.
Jared Watkins (COL ’11), a member of the steering committee, said the policy makes it difficult for potential majors or minors to enroll in introductory courses. The high demand for a limited number of seats, Watkins claims, combined with the priority given to athletes, prevents many non-athletes from enrolling in this introductory course until they gain priority as juniors and seniors.
The enrollment obstacle has been magnified by the recent trend of designating introductory courses as a prerequisite. Priority registrations have made it challenging for students to take upper level courses which require introductory classes as prerequisites. At the same time, Watkins said, priority registration “gums up the works,” as non-athletes are often forced to take introductory and advanced courses out of sequence.
Morris said the difficulty of enrolling in these courses is detrimental to the program as a whole.
“For the major to be more visible and completion of the program more viable, people to want to do serious academic work in the Women and Gender Studies need to be able to get in,” she said.
Morris noticed a marked increase in interest when the University qualified Introduction to Women and Gender Studies to satisfy the Humanities and Writing II requirement for the College, the McDonough School of Business, and the School of Foreign Service.
Isabel Buchanan (COL ’11), also a member steering committee, credits the program’s popularity among athletes to kind and accommodating professors.
“This translates to being very easy, which is not necessarily true,” she said.
Morris recounted an exchange in which several student athletes from the same team confronted her at the end of a semester, explaining that they took her class in the hopes of garnering an easy grade and expressing disappointment that the class was more challenging than anticipated.
The priority registration policy can also skew classroom composition, she added. Her main concern is not that her class might be composed of mainly athletes, but that a large contingency will be from the same team. She said that students on the same team tend to sit next to each other and are absent en masse on game days, trends also noticed by Watkins.
Morris said high representation of a single team can also affect diversity of perspective, of particular concern Women and Gender Studies program. “Some sports are dominated by students of color, and others are almost completely white.”
Watkins echoed this concern, saying that students on the same team tend to sit together. Their absence on game days also tends to be noticeable in the smaller classes.
“Students with a genuine interest are going to be affected by that imbalance,” Buchanan said.
The difficulty lies in gauging genuine interest, Morris added, as well as in balancing the desire for new students to be exposed to the field.
Heath said the registrar examines the distribution in each class during preregistration. When a small class is weighted with athletes, the office encourages some to find an alternate course. He said the registrar’s office pays close attention to athletes enrolled in Women and Gender Studies classes, as this department has expressed the most concern.
During the December meeting, the steering committee proposed several solutions to the issue. Among them was the suggestion that professors take advantage of the option to eliminate electronic waitlist for their classes, so students must express interest to the professor in person. Another was to contact athletic officials, asking them to limit how many athletes from the same team enroll in a given class. Nonetheless, some remain frustrated.
“It’s simply a question of, are other Georgetown students not being fairly accommodated?” Morris said.
Does Title IX address issues such as priority enrollment to student athletes?