Athens, Ga. – Internationally recognized expert on sports issues and racial inequities within sports Richard Lapchick will present the 21st annual Clifford Lewis Scholar Lecture on Tuesday, April 20.
Lapchick will present a lecture titled, Sport: A Bridge Across the Racial Divide at 4 p.m. in Master’s Hall at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education Conference Center and Hotel.
Often described as “the social conscience of sport,” Lapchickis the DeVos/Orlando Magic Sport Business Management Eminent Scholar at the University of Central Florida, where he established the DeVos Sport Business Management Program, ranked one of the nation’s top five such programs by the Wall Street Journal, The Sports Business Journal and ESPN The Magazine.
He is founder and director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, which serves as a comprehensive resource for issues related to gender and race in amateur, collegiate and professional sports.
Lapchick is the author of the internationally acclaimed Racial and Gender Report Card which tracks the hiring practices of professional and college sports. The institute publishes annual studies on student-athlete graduation rates and racial attitudes in sports. The institute also monitors other critical ethical issues in college and professional sport such as potential for the exploitation of student-athletes, gambling, performance-enhancing drugs and violence in sport.
The son of former Boston Celtics player and New York Knicks coach Joe Lapchick, he founded the Center for the Study of Sport in Society in 1984 at Boston’s Northeastern University. He served as director for 17 years and is now the director emeritus. The Center has attracted national attention for its pioneering efforts to ensure the education of athletes from junior high school through the professional ranks. The Center’s Project TEAMWORK was called “America’s most successful violence prevention program” by public opinion analyst Lou Harris. It won the Peter F. Drucker Foundation Award as the nation’s most innovative non-profit program.
He is also the president and CEO of the National Consortium for Academics and Sport, a group of more than 230 colleges and universities that created the first of its kind degree completion and community service programs focused on teaching youth how to improve race relations, develop conflict resolution skills, prevent gender violence, and avoid drug and alcohol abuse.
Lapchick has written 14 books and is a regular columnist for ESPN.com and The Sports Business Journal.He regularly contributes to the op-ed page of the Orlando Sentinel and has written more than 450 articles and given more than 2,700 public speeches. He has appeared numerous times on Nightline, Good Morning America, Face The Nation, The Today Show, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, the CBS Evening News, CNN and ESPN.
The lecture is sponsored by the UGA College of Education’s department of kinesiology in honor of the late associate dean and physical education professor Clifford Lewis, a faculty member at UGA from 1946 until her retirement in 1984. It is free and open to the public.
The lecture will be preceded by a reception in the lobby at 3:30 p.m.
