Hamilton College Philosophy Professor Robert Simon has been named to the advisory and editorial board for the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium on College Sports. He is the only representative from a Division III college on the 13-member group, which was created by NCAA President Myles Brand.
The inaugural meeting of the group will take place January 2008 in conjunction with the NCAA national convention in Nashville, Tenn. The purpose of the Colloquium is to promote research of the highest quality focusing on intercollegiate athletics and their influence on university and cultural life.
The advisory and editorial board, which had an organizational meeting in Orlando in January, will be responsible for the colloquium program and related publications. The board includes senior scholars in fields ranging from the philosophy of sport, sport management, and exercise physiology to sport law and journalism and is chaired by Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sport science at Penn State University.
Simon's area of interest is ethics in sports, including steroid use among athletes. A past Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has served as president of the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport (now the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport). Simon was also a Fellow at both the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1975-76) at Stanford and the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. (1981-82). He was the successful coach of the men's varsity golf team at Hamilton from 1986-2000, during which time his teams were often nationally ranked in Division III and represented Hamilton, either as a team or through individual qualifiers in five NCAA Championships.
Simon is the author of Fair Play, (Westview Press) on sports and social values. He is also author (with Norman E. Bowie) of The Individual and the Political Order and Neutrality and the Academic Ethic, and editor of The Blackwell Guide to Political and Social Philosophy. Simon is the recipient of numerous teaching awards and sits on the editorial board for the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. He was appointed the Marjorie and Robert W. McEwen Professor of Philosophy in July 2005.
Joining Simon on the board are faculty members from Penn State University, Marquette University, Ohio State University, the University of Maryland, Murray State University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and the University of Virginia.
The theme of the 2008 Colloquium – College Sports: A Legitimate Focus for Scholarly Inquiry? – raises a fundamental question: namely, whether the topic of sports, specifically as found in institutions of higher education, provides a unique and worthy subject matter for research.
