Writes David Martin:
Please don’t make excuses for the egregious academic offenses at UNC with the “everybody does it” argument. Yes, the whole revenue-sports connection to institutions of higher learning in the country is pretty much one big scandal and outrage, but to date no evidence has come to light that any college has even come close to doing what UNC did. For eighteen years UNC provided fake classes for scholarship athletes to keep them academically eligible to represent the university’s teams. They blatantly turned the whole notion of “student athletes” into a farce, and they have been stonewalling about what they have done for years. Furthermore, the scandal reaches far beyond the classroom, with evidence that all sorts of benefits have been funneled to their revenue-generating athletes that neither the NCAA nor the news media have shown much interest in pursuing.
To be sure, an arrangement where the generators of so much money are deprived of the opportunity to receive any of that money could hardly be better designed to generate corruption, but up to now the University of North Carolina seems to have been treated as “too big to fail” as compared to other college athletic programs.
Please see my “Silence Broken in UNC Athletic Scandal” for a fuller treatment of the subject.
Dave, sorry, but I don’t see UNC as unique. I do agree with you that nothing significant will be done. There is too much money and fraud, civic and academic, involved.
9:15 am on October 28, 2014
