Up until last Tuesday, we thought a world in which Cam Newton was a Normal College Student was almost impossible. We weren’t the only ones.
Not that Newton asked them, but upon learning during his campus visit earlier this month that the Blessed Individual would be returning to Auburn to work on completing a degree in sociology, TWER is told that Auburn’s Athletic Department staff met to discuss the possibility of providing him special, decidedly not normal accommodations in order to provide as normal a college life as a millionaire whose every move through Haley Center would surely be recorded by Windows phones he himself was pitching in commercials could hope for.
Maybe send a car to take him to and from class? Maybe some sort of security detail? Both ideas were shot down in favor of doing nothing. No chaperone, no shadow, no chauffeur. Nothing. That’s apparently what Cam wanted anyway. Cam gets what Cam wants.
The re-enrollment of Auburn’s previous Heisman Trophy winner in 1990 was handled decidedly differently and announced with a press conference. And it may have backfired somewhat. Bo Jackson’s celebrity–it was at the height of the “Bo Knows” campaign, when he was bigger than Michael Jordan, when he was kind of making cameos in Pretty Woman and Lethal Weapon–was supposedly too big a distraction for him to graduate when he had originally planned. He didn’t walk across the stage until 1995.
That the news of the Newton’s enrollment–broken in a nonchalant, Tuesday morning tweet by Gus Malzahn–would create a media storm was a given. But after a few days, the hope was that Cam would eventually stop trending in the Auburn Twittersphere. And a full academic week into the Cam Newton Normal College Student experiment—no fuss, little to no preferential treatment or special privileges—that appears to have happened.
No, you can’t find Cam Newton Normal College Student in the People Finder feature on the Auburn University website. But apparently there are plenty of normal college students you can’t find.
“It’s not at all unusual for students to put a ‘confidentiality flag’ on their records,” says Mike Clardy, Director of Auburn’s Office of Communications and Marketing. “Hundreds do so each semester. From that standpoint, he is being treated the same way all of our students are.”
Graphic: AUltered Ego, check it out.
Related: Cam in class.
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