From unc Another Damaging Dodgy Response To NCAA
UNC’s phony-course scandal is one symptom of a deeply compromised system. For nearly two decades, the university maintained a crip “African studies” curriculum whose apparent purpose was to enhance the grade point averages of academically challenged varsity athletes. To charge, as has the NCAA, that bogus courses evaded “institutional control” is comic understatement, as is its weasel-word characterization as “anomalous.”
No UNC administrator since Bill Friday has exercised “institutional control” over the sprawling and autonomous UNC athletic complex. Friday’s successors have instead paid pricey lawyers versed in the defense of monkey business. They have devised the dodgy response that gross irregularity is outside the NCAA’s jurisdiction. But if bogus courses designed to assist underachieving athletes is not NCAA business, what would be? Free whiskey for the ladies’ field hockey teams?
The damage is to the integrity of UNC and disheartening to any and all who value its traditions and honor system.
The victim of this wound is UNC, and it is self-inflicted.
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article94419977.html
UNC’s phony-course scandal is one symptom of a deeply compromised system. For nearly two decades, the university maintained a crip “African studies” curriculum whose apparent purpose was to enhance the grade point averages of academically challenged varsity athletes. To charge, as has the NCAA, that bogus courses evaded “institutional control” is comic understatement, as is its weasel-word characterization as “anomalous.”
No UNC administrator since Bill Friday has exercised “institutional control” over the sprawling and autonomous UNC athletic complex. Friday’s successors have instead paid pricey lawyers versed in the defense of monkey business. They have devised the dodgy response that gross irregularity is outside the NCAA’s jurisdiction. But if bogus courses designed to assist underachieving athletes is not NCAA business, what would be? Free whiskey for the ladies’ field hockey teams?
The damage is to the integrity of UNC and disheartening to any and all who value its traditions and honor system.
The victim of this wound is UNC, and it is self-inflicted.
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article94419977.html