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NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
EDUCATION
Athletics Department reaches NCAA graduation goal
BY B.J. RAINS rains@kansan.com
The Athletics Department released updated Graduation Success Rate data on Monday, and the numbers met NCAA President Myles Brand's goal of 70 percent.
The data, which will be officially released by the NCAA in the near future, examined a four-year average of student athletes who had scholarships when they enrolled in the fall of 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. Student athletes had a maximum of six years to complete a degree and had to remain on scholarship the entire time that they were enrolled to be eligible. Athletes who transferred from the
University of Kansas but were in good academic standing when they left were eliminated and did not count for or against the University's numbers.
Seventy percent of KU scholarship athletes who entered as freshmen from 1998 to 2001 either graduated from the University within six years or left the school in good academic standing.
"We've met the mark that Myles Brand set out for us, and we're equivalent and in the same range as the institution as a whole, so we've met our obligation there too," said Paul Buskirk, associate athletics director for student athlete support services. "This is the true measure of success."
"Are we finishing what we start
ed with the kids? Seventy percent,
I'm real pleased with that."
Two programs, women's golf and softball, graduated 100 percent of scholarship members who arrived from 1998 to 2001.
Women's basketball was the worst program in the department, with only 42 percent of the athletes who arrived from 1998 to 2001 receiving degrees. Current women's basketball coach Bonnie Henrickson did not arrive at Kansas until 2004, and Buskirk said the percentage would be much higher in a few years when it included Henrickson's data. Before Henrickson arrived, several players left the school in poor academic standing, which caused the percentage to be below the federal
average rate of 54 percent.
Jim Marchiony, associate athletics director, said the problem with the data was that it only tracked students who came to the University from as recently as 2001. That meant no recruits from Bill Self, Mark Mangino or Henrickson were included in the data. Students already in the program when the coaches arrived were included in the data, meaning that even though the coaches did not recruit the athletes on the list, they still played a part in whether the athletes graduated.
Men's tennis and men's swimming and diving, which were both canceled in 2000, were included on the report, because the programs had athletes during part of the data
period.
"It's very dated data," Marchiony said. "It doesn't portray a picture of what is going on today at the University of Kansas, or any other school for that matter."
The Graduation Success Rate is used to help formulate the University's Academic Progress Rate, which carries penalties for poor performance. The APR is similar to a progress report that checks what percentage of current athletes are in good academic standing with the University and are on pace to graduate. The University's APR last year caused the football team to lose two scholarships for this season.
This year's APR will be released in April, and Buskirk said that
every athletic team would be above the minimum score of 925 for the first time in school history. He said that the football team also would be getting back its scholarships.
"Our APR is going to look really good," Buskirk said.
While the Athletics Department graduated a percentage of athletes similar to the percentage of students that the University graduated. Marchiony said that the Athletics Department's goal was to go above 70 percent.
"Our ultimate goal is 100 percent." Marchiony said. "That's the goal — to see every single one of them graduate either here or somewhere else."
Archaeologists: Stonehenge was a healing center
Edited by Jennifer Torline
HISTORY
Excavation shows the monument attracted sick from all over Europe
ASSOCIATED PRESS
President of the Society of Antiquaries, Geoff Waintright, right, and archaeology professor Tim Darvill look at a fragment of bluestones before their press conference on Monday at the Society of Antiquaries of in London to reveal their preliminary findings about the purpose of the prehistoric Stonehenge monument. Waintrill and Darvill told journalists that Stonehenge was a kind of primeval Lounes. They said the stone circle was a center of healing which attracted the sick and infirmed from all over prehistoric Europe. They also said they had dated the first stone monuments at the site to about 2,300 B.C., which was centuries younger than previously thought.
LONDON — The first excavation of Stonehenge in more than 40 years has uncovered evidence that the stone circle drew ailing pilgrims from around Europe for what they believed to be its healing properties, archaeologists said Monday.
Archaeologists Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill said the content of graves scattered around the monument and the ancient chipping of its rocks to produce amulets indicated that Stonehenge was the primeval equivalent of Lourdes, the French shrine venerated for its supposed ability to cure the sick.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
An unusual number of skeletons recovered from the area showed signs of serious disease or injury. Analysis of their teeth showed that about half were from outside the Stonehenge area.
"People were in a state of distress,
if I can put it as politely as that, when they came to the Stonehenge monument," Darvill told journalists assembled at London's Society of Antiquaries.
He pointed out that experts near Stonehenge have found two skulls that showed evidence of primitive surgery, some of just a few known cases of operations in prehistoric Britain.
"Even today, that's the pretty serious end of medicine," he said. Also found near Stonehenge was the body of a man known as the Amesbury Archer, who had a damaged skull and badly hurt knee and died around the time the stones were installed. Analysis of the Archer's bones showed he was from the Alps.
Darvill cautioned, however, that the new evidence did not rule out other uses for Stonehenge.
"It could have been a temple, even as it was a healing center," Darvill said. "Just as Lourdes, for
example, is still a religious center."
The archaeologists managed to date the construction of the stone monument to about 2,300 B.C., a couple of centuries younger than was previously thought. It was at that time that bluestones — a rare rock known to geologists as spotted dolomite — were shipped by hand or by raft from Pembrokeshire in Wales to Salisbury Plain in southern England, to create the inner circle of Stonehenge.
The outer circle, composed of much larger sandstone slabs, is what most people associate with the monument today, particularly since only about a third of the 80 or so bluestones remain. The scientists argued that they were once at the heart of Stonehenge, and closely associated with its healing properties.
As evidence, Darvill said his dig had uncovered masses of fragments carved out of the bluestones by people to create amulets. Any rock carried around in such a way would have had some sort of protective or healing property, he said. He said that theory was backed by burials in southwest England where the stones were interred with their owners.
Today the bluestones are now largely invisible, dwarfed by the huge sandstone monoliths — or "hanging stones" — that were erected later and still make up Stonehenge's iconic profile.
"They are of course quite impressive when you see them," Darvill said. "But in a sense they are the elaboration of a structure which kicked off with the bluestones."
Both archaeologists quoted the 12th-century monk Geoffrey of Monmouth as saying the stones were thought to have medicinal properties. They also said that evidence uncovered by their dig showed that people were moving and chipping off pieces of the bluestones through the Roman period and even into the Middle Ages.
Darvill said he felt the "folk- lore interest" in the bluestones into modern times suggested some sort of lingering memory of their supposed healing powers.
"That would be for me the single strongest piece of evidence," he said.
Andrew Fitzpatrick, from British heritage group Wessex Archaeology, and Darvill and Wainwright's discovery was "very important" but that the healing
Broadcasting Corp.
theory, while plausible, was not the only one.
"I don't think we can rule out the other main competing theory — that the temple was a meeting point between the land of the living and the dead," he told the British
Scientists announced their findings Monday, ahead of a documentary due to air on the BBC and the Smithsonian Channel on Saturday, Sept. 27.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wainwright holds a fragment of bluestone after a press conference on Monday at the Society of Antiquaries of in London to reveal preliminary findings about the purpose of the prehistoric Stonehenge monument. Two British archeologists say the first excavation at the site of Stonehenge in more than 40 years has shed new light on the purpose of the landmark.