Jan Kemp and the Lessons of Resistance

I consider myself a reasonably informed person, especially when it comes to sports. And, as someone invested in the relationships between communication and power, I like to think I know quite a bit about those moments in sports history when people stood up to undemocratic or unjust practices. But until today, I had never heard of Jan Kemp.

Kemp died last Thursday at the age of 59. She had been an English instructor at the University of Georgia in the 1980s, where she became (in)famous for blowing the whistle on the university's football program and its preferential treatment of academically deficient student-athletes. By speaking out, Kemp lost her job, became an object of scorn for Bulldogs football fans, and eventually one of the key figures in the reform of college athletics.

I'm a tenure-track facutly member, at a "mid-major" university, with an academic commitment to promoting justice and democracy. But if I'm being honest, I think it would be really difficult to speak out against the BGSU athletic department if they were being systematically unethical (which, to my knowledge, they are not). There's just so much power concentrated in university athletics and so much vitriol directed at those who resist that power. In Kemp's case, she was not in a tenure-track position and she was teaching at a university in the Southeastern Conference. As if Southern college football fans aren't devoted enough, keep in mind, too, that Georgia had just won the 1980 national championship. In other words, what Kemp did took serious courage.

Kemp later won a court settlement and was reinstated at the university. Perhaps more importantly, the improprieties she identified at Georgia sparked a series of reforms by the NCAA that modestly improved the ethical guidelines for intercollegiate athletics. She is, therefore, an important figure in the struggle for justice in sports.

I learned of Jan Kemp through ESPN's Pat Forde. His column is perhaps guilty of elevating one person's humble efforts to the realm of the "heroic." Nevertheless, he reminds us that we needn't accept the corruption of college sports as inevitable and that there are those who have helped teach us that lesson in the past. And, as I prepare my syllabus for next spring's graduate seminar "Sport and Resistance," Forde has provided me with an exemplary case to extend that lesson in the future.