Prof Threatens To Fail Athlete For Missing Class For Championship Game

East Central College is a community college in Missouri that qualified for the NJCAA volleyball national championship tomorrow in Toledo. The ECC Falcons might have to compete without one of their best players, though, because her biology professor won't let her miss class.

KTVI has the full story, and it's a stupid one. College athletes do, indeed, miss class—even at the junior college level. Freshman Hannah Leslie has, apparently, missed too many classes due to competition travel and bio professor Dr. Parvee has had it with her absences—threatening to fail her if she misses another while at the national championship.

I'm not going to slam the pretend academic integrity of community colleges, because I used to teach at one. But I also used to teach at USF, where my course was popular with several basketball players who, owing to extensive Big East travel, had to miss class a lot. We always made arrangements for them to make up the work, and Bob McCullum—who was head coach at the time—was great about checking in with me to see that his guys were showing up and doing what they were supposed to. It's absolutely mindblowing that a junior college bio prof thinks s/he should deprive a student-athlete of her opportunity like this. It's also possible Hannah Leslie had other academic issues in the class; we've only heard her side of the story, after all, and Dr. Parvee isn't talking. But as it reads now, this is one of the dumbest student-athlete stories we've read all year.

[ KTVI]