Welcome

John Nichols — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:11:16 +0000

The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA; the Coalition) is an alliance of faculty senates from NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools. COIA’s mission is to provide a national faculty voice on intercollegiate sports issues. Areas of concern include academic integrity and quality, student-athlete welfare, campus governance of intercollegiate athletics, commercialization, and fiscal responsibility. The Coalition is committed to the development of effective strategies and proposals for significant, long-term reform in college athletics. COIA works with university faculties, administrations, trustee boards, and national associations concerned with higher education, to implement these strategies and proposals.

Sixty-one of the FBS schools that have faculty senates are members of COIA. During the past several years, COIA has produced a number of white papers and other documents that lay out recommendations for reform. These recommendations offer best practices that can be used by schools to examine their own policies and practices with regard to intercollegiate athletics. Many of these recommendations have also been discussed with the NCAA as possible action items.

The faculty governance body of any NCAA FBS school can be a member of COIA (see How to Join COIA). We are an ad hoc group and operate without staff or budget. Our direction is determined by our member senates, and we warmly welcome any NCAA Division IA senate that votes to join the COIA on the basis of a general agreement with the principles laid out in our policy papers and reports.

What’s New in COIA?

tfc115 — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:40:01 +0000

INCREASING FACULTY ENGAGEMENT IN A DEREGULATED ATHLETICS CONTEXT

2013 COIA Best Practices Report

The 2013 National COIA Meeting was devoted to preparing a constructive set of best practices, or a “tool-kit,” specifically designed to increase faculty engagement in the governance of intercollegiate athletics in the context of the new NCAA reform initiatives. As the only national organization representing elected faculty governance bodies, COIA is uniquely positioned to both develop such a tool kit and then help roll it out at our universities for implementation. The NCAA leadership has actively participated in this project. Please click here to read the full draft statement.

Also see:
Preparing for NCAA Partial Deregulation of Intercollegiate Athletics Ensuring a Faculty Role in a New Regulatory Structure. Overview of Plenary and Break-Out Group Sessions. COIA National Meeting, February 2-3, 2013.

New COIA Members: Nevada-Las Vegas and U Mass-Amherst

COIA is pleased to announce that, by votes of their respective faculty governance bodies, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have become the 60th and 61st members of our coalition. A special thanks to Nancy Lough (Professor of Educational Psychology & Higher Education at UNLV and new COIA rep) and Ernest May (Professor of Music and Secretary of the U Mass-Amherst Faculty Senate) for their leadership in making this happen. COIA welcomes its newest members.

COIA/John Curley Center for Sports Journalism articles published in Journal of Intercollegiate Sport

Most universities with big-time sports programs have not used all the tools at their disposal to protect academic integrity and improve transparency and accountability of intercollegiate athletics on their campuses, according to a national survey conducted by the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA) and researchers at Penn State. Read more about the COIA/Curley Center survey and case studies of six high-scoring institutions…

Or download the full articles in the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport at the links below:

Integration of Athletics and Academics: Survey of Practices at FBS Schools
By John S. Nichols, Thomas F. Corrigan, & Marie Hardin

Case Studies in Athletic-Academic Integration: A Closer Look at Schools that Implement COIA’s Best Practices
By Thomas F. Corrigan, Marie Hardin, & John S. Nichols

The full issue of Journal of Intercollegiate Sport is available here