For Carlos Boozer, being a sociology major isn't necessarily about workloads, ease or simply following in the long line of Blue Devil basketball players to study humans' social tendencies.
As the starting center on Duke's men's basketball team, Boozer notes his major's applicability to what is now an activity but will soon be his livelihood.
"Sociology is the study of people's interactions," says Boozer, a junior who plans to graduate early. "I interact with a lot of people in the profession I'm in."
Despite stating genuine interest in the subject, Boozer does acknowledge his major may require less time than other fields of study at Duke. He is quick to point out, though, that as a varsity athlete, the time he is able to devote to his studies is less than that of the typical student.
"If you're a regular student, you might be a part of a social club, like a fraternity or a sorority, or some other thing that you can get involved in at Duke," Boozer says. "But you have a lot more free time, so you can go out and party and not worry about going to practice. You just worry about going to class."
The concentration of athletes in certain majors, particularly social sciences like sociology, has become an issue among Duke officials amid a nationwide discussion of the role of college sports. Last summer, the Knight Foundation's Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics released a report criticizing college sports for low academic standards, and schools in the academically-oriented Ivy League have recently taken steps to decrease the number of athletes they admit.
More locally, administrators from both the academic and athletic sides of Duke are in the midst of examining the challenges the University's athletes face in class. Unlike many other big-time college programs, Duke has not experienced widespread problems in graduation rates or frequent exoduses to professional leagues.
Instead, administrators are focusing on less obvious concerns, such as the disparity between athletes and non-athletes in choosing academic majors. In December, Dean of Trinity College Robert Thompson presented a survey on the subject to the University's Board of Trustees, offering possible reasons for the disparity and discussing its implications for departments.
Thompson declined to release the results of the survey, although he acknowledges that athletes, more than other students, tend to major in the social sciences, and in particular in fields that can help prepare them for a business career.
"Athletes very early on, before they come into the college world, start to have a common set of ideas about what they want to do," he says. "The interests of athletes, compared to the overall student body, tend to be very business-related."
For many athletes, Thompson says, that has meant majoring in fields like history or sociology, and getting a certificate in markets and management studies, which is administered in part by the sociology department. According to media guides, six of the nine members of the men's basketball team who have declared their majors are concentrating in either history or sociology, and the football team has twice as many majors in sociology as in any other discipline.
To Associate Director of Athletics Christopher Kennedy, who has worked with Duke athletes for over 20 years, such aggregate numbers do not have much relevance. He says, however, that on an anecdotal basis, athletes' majors indicate something unique about their personalities.
"Athletes tend to want to deal in concrete things. They tend to shy away from abstraction--that's why you find them majoring in history and politics, rather than philosophy," Kennedy says.
Last year, William Bowen and James Shulman of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation published a comprehensive and widely cited report on the academic performance of college athletes.
In The Game of Life, they surveyed all Division I-A schools and compiled statistics on the differences between athletes and non-athletes in grade point average, graduation rate and many other characteristics, including choice of major.
The study paid particular attention to Ivy League and other private universities, including Duke, and compared statistics over several decades.
Bowen and Shulman
Moreover, they found the disparity is especially prominent in "High Profile" sports--football, men's basketball and, in some cases, men's hockey. Although they did not specify schools by name, Bowen and Shulman concluded that such trends carry over into specific departments and are not always rooted in interest or in scheduling concerns.
"In college after college, and university after university, we find that athletes in the High Profile sports, in particular, are highly concentrated in certain departments," they write.
"These concentrations have become much more pronounced in recent years than they were even in the 1976 cohort, and it is possible that the explanation goes beyond shared curricular and career interests, relevant as these are.
"There is presumably some tendency for word-of-mouth referrals to affect decisions about fields of study, for friends to want to stay together and for other social factors to come into play. These concentrations also encourage [certain] effects including some that are relevant to the issue of academic underperformance."
At Duke, however, some athletes believe academic underperformance may be more a perception than a reality. Duke athletes often realize that simply gaining academic respect can be a task in itself, regardless of their actual academic achievements.
As an athlete, Boozer says he sometimes needs to prove himself to his professors as an academic equal of his non-athlete classmates. Doing so, he claims, necessitates getting past the stereotype that exists not only at Duke but around the nation--the manifestation of the "dumb jock" label.
"I can't envision somebody not viewing [athletes] a little differently," Boozer says. "The main difference for us isn't really our peers, but it's more the professors. They probably think we're going to get off in this class so they're going to make it a little tougher for us, and if we're not in class, they're going to knock us off more than they would a regular student.
"But not all professors are like that--some professors will help you a little more because they know you're a little busier."
Fighting the stereotype happens not only in sociology, but on Science Drive as well. Although Boozer may typify Duke basketball players in terms of his major, there are some who transcend the generalization.
Two such athletes are senior Matt Christensen, a civil engineering and economics double-major, and sophomore physics major Nick Horvath.
After listening to the advice of his father--a professor at Harvard Business School--Christensen chose engineering for the applied math and problem solving skills that he hopes to use professionally after graduation. Horvath and Christensen stand alone as the only two science majors on the Blue Devils' men's basketball roster.
Often the only athlete in his courses, Christensen notes that he and his 6'10" frame tend to stick out among his classmates. As a result, Christensen says he faces the same issues that confront Boozer and his other teammates, namely dealing with people's preconceptions that those who excel on the court cannot do the same in the classroom.
"There haven't been a lot of athletes who have been through Hudson Hall," Christensen says. "I've had lots of professors who when I've talked to them and said 'I'm going to miss class for basketball' they said 'I've never had an athlete before--I don't know exactly how this is going to go but we'll try and figure it out.' I've had varying degrees of success in negotiating a good way of dealing with that. It's definitely been hard, and where it's been hard has been with the professors.
"Civil engineering is far from the most popular major at Duke, so I've got the same classes with the same people and I have for quite a while. I think [the other students] figured out pretty quickly that I do pretty well at it. From working with them on projects and stuff, that comes across."
Varsity athletes like Boozer and Christensen aren't the only ones affected by the overrepresentation of athletes in the field of sociology. As the generalization that athletes are less intelligent than other Duke students proliferates, non-athlete sociology majors find themselves defending their academic interests.
"People aren't saying that it's a 'smart athlete's' major," says junior sociology major Joanna Steiner. "They're saying it's a 'dumb athlete's' major and it's an easy 'A.'"
While frustrated by such broad criticisms of the department, Steiner admits that they may have some validity.
"I think there are two different kinds of sociology majors," Steiner says. "You can take sociology as a major very easily if you want to, but you can also take it as a hard major.
"I think you can make any major you want decently easy if you choose to do the easy work, it's just that I think [sociology] is a major that you may have an even easier time doing that with."
Currently enrolled in the sociology class "Sex, Gender and Society," along with basketball players Boozer, Jason Williams, Chris Duhon and Andre Buckner, Steiner acknowledges that they and other athletes do seem to be interested in the material.
However, she admits that while some defy the stereotype surrounding Duke athletes who major in sociology, others fit the mold well.
"The courses that some athletes take may be of a lesser caliber than the courses that many other sociology majors take," Steiner says.
Administrators will not release statistics on whether that is the case. They do caution, however, that there are dangers in lending credence to urban legends about athletes' classes and majors.
They point to safeguards in graduation requirements, especially in Curriculum 2000, as further assurances that athletes will not slide through Duke with easy academic loads.
"The tendency of a high proportion of athletes to major in certain fields has much to do with the career plans of students and less to do with the quality of courses or rigor of classes or the nature of the workload," says William Chafe, vice provost for undergraduate education. "I think it's dangerous to buy into self-perpetuating illusions."
On a departmental level, professors say having athletes in classes matters little to instructors. Angela O'Rand, director of undergraduate studies in sociology, says she has never heard her department characterized as a discipline with a lot of athlete majors. Like Boozer, she cites the subject matter of the field and the flexible nature of the social sciences in general as possible explanations for any disparity.
"There's nothing extraordinary in their treatment. We treat them like everyone else," O'Rand says. "When students take our classes, we see our roles as teaching the students in our classes. There are a wide variety of students in our classes."
Kennedy also says that with respect to choosing classes, athletes are no different from other students in wanting to have a balanced schedule. They choose classes that are just as hard as those taken by non-athletes, he says, but also like non-athletes, they choose classes that may be easier or may give them more flexibility in scheduling their work.
"I think the economy of the fact that you can use [markets and management] classes for a sociology major makes it easy to go the way of both," Kennedy says. "It's interesting how some of them are choosing a certificate program and then choosing a major based around that, in some cases."
Athletes, like all Duke students, consider several factors in choosing their majors, with time constraints, career goals and curriculum flexibility all playing a role in the decision.
The goal, say Kennedy and others, is to ensure that athletes are able to manage those factors and have the same potential for academic success as other students. Although sociology and other social sciences often provide that potential, Christensen notes they are not the only areas in which an athlete can succeed.
"The reason why I think people make a big deal about what I'm doing and what Nick is doing is that it requires a lot of work," Christensen says.
"To do two majors... has required time and sacrifices that some people don't want to make. I've spent a large number of Friday and Saturday nights doing my homework. I think absolutely that there are other guys on this team that could do that, but they don't make the same choice."
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