Inside Manley Field House, student athletes weave in and out of computer labs, just across the hall from Director of Athletics Mark Coyle’s office and steps away from weight rooms, gym floors and fields.

The building is like the Pentagon of Syracuse University’s Athletic Department — a headquarters for more than 100 daily tutor sessions, practices and administrative operations. It’s also a site that many members of the SU community continue to keep their eyes on.

In March 2015, the NCAA released a 94-page report detailing numerous instances of misconduct into that department. A multiyear investigation uncovered drug policy violations, abuse of benefits and academic misconduct, among other infractions. In all, it caused the NCAA to deduce that SU did not have control over its athletics department.

SU was handed sanctions that included a 5-year probation, scholarship reductions, vacation of wins and a 9-game suspension for men’s basketball coach Jim Boeheim.

At Manley Field House, there’s a tutor available for every student athlete, and officials are more committed to compliance with NCAA bylaws than in years before. But back on Main Campus, some questions about SU Athletics’ relationship with administrators and faculty endure.

Athletes’ days are jam-packed and demanding, said Steve Ishmael, wide receiver for SU’s football team. At the Stevenson Educational Center in Manley, tutors, administrators and academic coordinators help him with big picture things, like his schedule, and smaller details, like the proper place for a comma in his essay.

But there are limits to how much tutors can help Ishmael and the other student athletes. Over the course of its investigation, the NCAA discovered multiple cases of academic misconduct. A paper written by Fab Melo was submitted for a grade change with citations added by an administrator. In another instance, a tutor gave false accounts of how many hours three football players spent at an internship.

Tommy Powell, assistant provost for student-athlete development, redesigned SU’s academic services for student athletes when he came to SU in 2013. He increased the number of tutors from 35 to 140 and added more academic coordinators to the Stevenson Center, increasing the levels of oversight throughout the program.

The process of ensuring compliance starts from the bottom-up. Tutors have to document sessions with student athletes, and coordinators review those forms to compile reports. Powell then looks over those reports for any issues and later meets with the vice chancellor and provost, who sends a report to the chancellor and the Board of Trustees.

Powell uses the reports from coordinators, as well as other records, to track all student-athletes’ grade point averages, percentages of degree completion and other benchmarks set out by the NCAA. The benchmarks make up student-athletes’ academic progress rates, which determines whether athletes are on track for 5-year degree completion.

Currently, all teams have at least 94 percent success rates, according to a Feb. 17 University Senate Committee on Instruction report. This metric does not account for graduation rates.

Powell said it helps that his title has a focus on academics rather than athletics, because it shows the program is making strides to be more present on campus. He also meets regularly with Rick Burton, SU’s faculty athletics representative for the Atlantic Coast Conference and the NCAA.

Burton is also chair of the Athletics Compliance Oversight Committee, which was created last year. Chancellor Kent Syverud established the committee in light of the sanctions, Burton said, to work on “institutional protections to make sure that we are doing things the right way.”

Around the same time that Syverud announced the committee, he met with faculty to discuss the sanctions and how SU was working to move forward.

Faculty expressed concerns over transparency in the athletics budget, as well as SU Athletics’ overall role in relation to SU at large, said Joel Kaplan, associate dean for professional graduate studies in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

“The university community has been kept totally in the dark about the role of athletics at Syracuse University,” Kaplan said. “… The administration continues to refuse to open its books when it comes to the athletic budget and instead continues to make the academic units fund athletics.”

In 2015, the total athletics budget was between $60 and $70 million. Sue Edson, executive senior associate athletics director and chief communications officer at SU, said she couldn’t say how much of the total budget is dedicated to student-athlete support services because SU is a private institution.

Robert Van Gulick, chair of the Committee on Instruction, said his committee met with Powell at the end of the 2014-15 academic year to talk about academic integrity, student-athlete support services and how faculty can be better informed about how things work with student athletes. He said they were impressed by Powell’s efforts to bridge the gap between SU Athletics and SU.

But he said he’d like to see more transparency about what SU Athletics’ role is in relation to SU, especially considering that the $16 million used for athletic scholarships comes from a portion of schools and colleges’ budgets set aside for financial aid, Van Gulick said.

If the schools and colleges — and by extension the faculty — contribute to the welfare of student athletes, Van Gulick said they deserve to know more about what’s going on in student-athlete support services and the athletics department as a whole.

“We’re trying to build some better bridges there  … so that people could see this in a way where the two sides can work toward a common goal,” Van Gulick said. “And that goal is the academic success of student athletes.”

Published on March 8, 2016 at 11:56 pm

Contact Annie: apalme05@syr.edu