University of Massachusets Athletics
Rebecca Spencer Named New Faculty Athletics Representative
June 25, 2013 | General
June 25, 2013
AMHERST, Mass. - Dr. Rebecca Spencer, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts and a former student-athlete, has been named the campus's Faculty Athletics Representative to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Spencer will report directly to Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy and serve as a key advisor on intercollegiate athletics. The Faculty Athletics Representative is also a member of the Faculty Senate's Athletic Council.
Spencer will replace Glenn M. Wong who held the position for over 20 years. Wong announced he would be stepping down from the role earlier this year.
Subbaswamy says Spencer will be a valued and well-informed advisor on athletic matters. "She was selected because she is a highly respected academic with a deep interest in the welfare of student-athletes and in Title IX," Subbaswamy says. "She was a Division III student-athlete herself. She is thoughtful about the issues facing intercollegiate athletics in general and UMass Athletics in particular and respectful of the variety of perspectives on campus about these issues."
The chancellor notes that Spencer has been a member and chair of the Faculty Senate's Athletic Council, serving on its equity and compliance subcommittee and academics subcommittee.
Spencer was chosen from a group of five finalists for the position, each of whom was interviewed by the chancellor, Wong, and Susan Pearson, associate chancellor and advisor to the chancellor.
Spencer says she is looking forward to serving in this new position. She says she was a middle-distance runner as a student at Hope College in Michigan and has been a marathoner more recently. "So in some ways, I am still a scholar-athlete," Spencer says. "But my interests as a woman and mother of two sports-loving girls, are very much in the area of diversity issues around athletics."
There are several key areas where Spencer says she can play an important role on campus. "I'm hoping to improve communication and support from faculty to student-athletes and student-athletes to faculty," she says. "At the moment, I believe many student-athletes think the faculty don't support them because they over-generalize from the FBS-football conversations that have gone on at the Faculty Senate level. Likewise, faculty members may stereotype student-athletes, over-generalizing from experiences they've had with a student-athlete in the past. So I hope to improve communication and support in both directions."
"I am very pleased that Rebecca has been appointed as our next Faculty Athletics Representative," says Director of Athletics John McCutcheon. "She has been an outstanding member of the Athletic Council and I am sure that she will do equally as well in this new role. All of us in the Athletic Department look forward to working with her."
Wong, the outgoing Faculty Athletics Representative, agrees that Spencer is a good fit for the job. "She is very knowledgeable, understands intercollegiate athletics and will represent the university well," Wong says. "I congratulate Chancellor Subbaswamy and the university for an excellent choice."
According to the NCAA, the role of the faculty athletic representative is to ensure the academic integrity of the athletics program, ensure institutional control of the athletics program and be directly involved in decisions that affect the fiscal viability of the program.
Spencer earned a degree in biology and kinesiology from Hope College in 1997 before earning her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Purdue University in 2002. From 2002-07, she was a post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at Cal-Berkeley.
She has been and Assistant Professor and Director of the Cognition and Action Laboratory at UMass since 2008. In her time at UMass, she has been named a Center for Research on Families Scholar and a Chancellor's Junior Fellow. In 2011, she was honored by the New England Psychological Association for Outstanding Faculty-Student Collaboration.
In addition to her course teaching, Spencer is the Principal Investigator in the Cognition and Action (COGNAC) Lab at UMass.