UT using athletes’ help center as model for campus-wide facility
The Student Success Center, set to open in a temporary home this summer, will be patterned after the Thornton Athletics Student Life Center.
University officials are hoping the new center will draw students with lottery scholarships who need help keeping up their grades and anyone else who is looking for guidance.
“I call this the `just in time’ center,” Chancellor Loren Crabtree said Thursday. “There’s a moment in time when good students are, for example, looking for a major and can’t decide what they want to do or they’re in a major that isn’t suiting them very well and they’re unhappy with it. Hence, they get unhappy with the university. … They’re not failing students. They’re in a moment in time when they need help.”
The Student Success Center will be headed by Ruth Darling, who left her job as head adviser for the College of Arts and Sciences to be the director of the Thornton Center. The new Thornton Center director, who hasn’t been hired yet, will report to her.
The Thornton Center provided a testing ground for a larger facility. There are about 520 scholarship athletes, while the Student Success Center will be available to about 19,000 undergraduate students.
“This has really served as a great place to try out programs and evaluate the success and really serve as a model of what we can do for everybody,” Darling said.
The Student Success Center will start out as just a Web site to direct students to available programs. Darling hopes the center’s office will open by Aug. 1 in the former Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house between Presidential Court and Hess Hall. The house is being renovated now.
Administrators plan to raise money to renovate Melrose Hall, an old dorm next to Hodges Library, to permanently house the Student Success Center. They already have had some interest from big donors in helping the program, Crabtree said. There is no target date set.
UT trustee John Thornton of Chattanooga pledged $1 million in 1995 to start the private fund-raising for the center named after him, and it opened in April 2001.
About the same time, the university decided to move all academic programs for athletes under the authority of academic affairs instead of the athletic department in the wake of allegations of academic fraud among players. Investigations turned up no wrongdoing.
Under NCAA guidelines, universities are required to provide tutoring and academic counseling to athletes, and many universities offer those programs in places similar to the Thornton Center.
Having a program solely for athletes is permissible by the NCAA and not considered an “extra benefit,” but some critics said it was not fair all students couldn’t have a place like the Thornton Center.
University administrators, however, were thinking about all students, said Vice Chancellor Anne Mayhew, who was the NCAA faculty athletics representative at the time.
“When the Thornton Center was in the planning (stages) and when we made the decision to move the academic support services for student-athletes out of athletics and into academic affairs, one of the ideas there was we should in fact begin to plan on having services for all students,” Mayhew said. “We’ve been talking about this for several years.”