This Fall, the Philosophy and Religious Studies (RelPhil) Department renamed and consolidated several 300-level courses, partly in response to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) eligibility requirements. The NCAA approval process has also complicated the status of courses in departments including English and Computer Science.
The RelPhil Department combined its courses The New Testament, Hebrew Bible, and Religions of the Book into one course called Good and Evil (PHR310), and Asian Religions has been renamed Sages and Selves (PHR300). According to Elena Dugan, Instructor in RelPhil, the changes were intended in part to prevent course titles from creating eligibility problems for prospective Division I and Division II college athletes.
“The NCAA did not approve some of our religious studies classes on the grounds that maybe they were thinking that they were denominational. We’ve known that it was a problem for a while, and then it kind of took a couple years for us to actually figure it out. We wanted to make it so that if you wanted to get recruited, you wouldn’t have to make your RelPhil decision that way,” said Dugan.
Sean Logan, Dean of College Counseling, explained that the NCAA Eligibility Center reviews the academic records of prospective Division I and Division II athletes, although the two divisions have different subject requirements. Both require students to complete 16 NCAA-approved core courses.
“For Division I, you have to have four years of English, you have to have three years of mathematics, [and] natural sciences, two. They’ve just changed this so that it doesn’t have to be a lab science anymore, but it used to have to be two lab sciences. Now it just has to be a science course. There is an extra course that has to be English, Math, or Science… and then there’s two social science courses, and then four electives,” said Logan. “You have a four-year clock to do this.”
Kenneth Shows, Associate Dean of Studies for Advising and Associate Director of College Counseling, explained that the NCAA generally begins its evaluation with a course’s title and academic department. Certain words can prompt the organization to reject a course because of assumptions about its content.
“If the word Catholicism is in the title, it might not be approved because the NCAA might think it’s a class that’s teaching dogma, that it doesn’t consider to be academic. Likewise… if the word computer is in a title, that’s a thumbs down,” said Shows. “Scientific Computing, no. Data Structures and Algorithms, fine. Again, it’s very title-based, which I know seems bizarre, but that’s the way it works.”
Shows continued, “So one of the reasons that the RelPhil classes decided to change their titles is because specifically on the religious studies side, a lot of the classes that talked about things like the New Testament were getting automatically disqualified because they looked too religious, basically. So they’ve gone with titles that are a little more general.”
According to Logan, if a course is not initially approved, the CCO may submit its syllabus and other curricular information for further review. Logan said these materials typically resolve the issue, although some courses may still be rejected. He estimated that seven or eight courses are currently unapproved, including approximately five or six that the school has submitted multiple times.
“Sometimes… we have to go back to the teachers and say, ‘Can you give us the syllabus?’ Typically, then, it’ll get approved. But we have courses where we submit them every year, the teacher tweaks the syllabus, and, for whatever reason, they don’t pass them. We don’t typically get good reasoning from them on that,” said Logan.
The revised RelPhil courses have been submitted to the NCAA. Logan said the school received an initial response and subsequently resubmitted materials for some courses. Dugan explained how the RelPhil Department worked with the College Counseling Office (CCO) and NCAA to clarify the academic nature of its courses.
“The CCO has been super helpful. They’re also trying to fix the problem from their end. But really what it took was our department working with the NCAA directly … to make sure that not only that the class titles were changed, but that they understood the internal architecture of the classes,” said Dugan. “The content of the class is not changing at all. We just changed the title so that people like the NCAA could understand that it is a social science class about how people view the world.”
Shows noted that athletes who repeat a grade may face particular challenges with the NCAA’s course requirements.
“If you do 9th and 10th grade somewhere else and come here and repeat 10th grade, from the NCAA’s perspective, that’s your third year and 11th grade is your fourth year. So your Senior year won’t count at all from an NCAA qualification perspective. One of the hard guidelines for NCAA qualification is you must have four years of English,” said Shows. “If our English 100 class was just called English 1, that’d be really bad. Because if a kid came from another high school where they had also had English 1, it would appear that the courses were the same. And so the NCAA might only count one of those units and then it would be really hard for that student to qualify because they would only have three units of English in four years. So our titles are things like The Reader, The Writer, The Critical Thinker. And those look different enough to the NCAA that it doesn’t get double counted alongside some other English class that they took somewhere else.”
Kayla Lyons ’28 described her surprise at the change on the course listing. She thought of the replacement as a way to simplify the inherent complexities in Asian Religions and the Western religion courses.
“I thought [the department] was condensing, or rather softening, the RelPhil course because there’s so much to look into when it comes to a religion or philosophy class. By simply calling it Good and Evil, I thought it was saying that things are black and white in the world. To me it [had] seemed as though they were making the course a little easier to digest for everyone’s understanding,” said Lyons.
Jialai She ’27 emphasized the overall importance of RelPhil to Andover’s curriculum, citing his experience with Asian Religions.
“[Asian Religions] was definitely a lot of fun and we enjoyed the content that we took. We actually went in person to Hindu temples and had [an expert in Buddhism] come over and educate us. It was a very immersive experience. … RelPhil courses make you engage a lot with whatever content they decide to teach you. It makes you engage deeply,” said She.
