Someone worth remembering

Jan Kemp has died.

You ask, “Who's Jan Kemp?” Well, I’ll tell you.

Kemp, who died at just 59 from complications from Alzheimer's, was a woman who helped change the face of college athletics and make the moniker “student-athlete” not a complete farce.

Kemp, a University of Georgia professor, was fired in 1982 after blowing the whistle on the school for allowing athletes who failed remedial classes — yes, remedial classes — to continue to play sports.

She sued the school, and her lawsuit not only got her reinstated, it led to sweeping reforms at the school and helped lead to more stringent academic standards for students across the nation.

It did not, however, make her very popular in football-loving Georgia. An Associated Press story noted that “a newspaper columnist once wrote Kemp should be ‘the next teacher in space’ — not long after Christa McAuliffe, an elementary school teacher chosen by NASA's Teacher in Space Project, died in the shuttle Challenger explosion.”

For caring about doing the right thing — at the cost of incurring the wrath of an entire state — may God bless Jan Kemp.

For more on Kemp, see Pat Forde's column on her for ESPN:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=3761411&sportCat=ncf&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab4pos1