BROUGHT TO HEEL

                The cable-news people tell me that when politicians want to slip something past the public they release it on a Friday afternoon, when people are distracted by thoughts of weekend pleasures. It appears that the National Collegiate Athletic Association goes by the same playbook.

               That became clear a couple of Fridays ago when the organization announced that it had completed a multi-year investigation of academic fraud at the University of North Carolina by ruling that the issue was outside its purview and required no penalties worthy of the name.  Sports are sports and academics are, uh, academic, it said, in case anyone had been silly enough to think otherwise. Let’s forget this mess and move on to our real purpose of staging entertainments and counting the revenues therefrom.

                Perhaps also aided by the much-showier recent scandal involving the use of shoe-company money to bribe prospective college basketballers—one that prosecutors say has yet to fully unfold—the NCAA pretty much got its wish. Folks in Tar Heel Land were pleased that the fraud issue finally went away, and only a few perennial scolds registered disapproval. Haters are gonna hate, ya know? There’s just no pleasing some people.

                Truth is, though, the North Carolina case ranks as maybe the worst instance yet revealed of institutional-mission abuse in the name of sports. Over a period of 18 years—1993 to 2011—the university harbored an academic shell department whose main purpose was to keep its athletes eligible. Other black-letter NCAA scandals— Penn State’s silence over an assistant football coach’s serial child molestations, Michigan’s reliance on a numbers-racketeer to keep its “Fab Five” basketball stars in spending cash, a Baylor basketball coach’s subornation of perjury in a murder investigation— were one-offs, outside the usual order of things. This was a day-in, day-out matter perpetrated by the eyes-wide-open officers of a university charged with acting in the best interests of their students.

                Making the action more loathsome was that the department involved was called African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM for short) and thus targeted the black students who comprise a large part of the varsity basketball and football manpower pools of a university that embraced desegregation slowly and reluctantly (others did, too). Some 3,100 students took classes in the department and about half of them were varsity athletes. That group made up just 4% of UNC’s undergrad population.

 College basketball and football players often are admitted to their schools despite academic shortcomings, meaning that many of them need special help to succeed in class. Instead, through AFAM North Carolina passed out A’s and B’s to enrollees who didn’t have to attend class and whose term papers, when required, could be written by others, various investigations showed.

                Further, these credits often were more than just stop-gaps for the otherwise qualified. This came out in 2014 when Rashad McCants, a star of UNC’s 2005 NCAA men’s national basketball championship team, sued UNC for pressing him into a sham education. Under the guise of privacy rules colleges guard their athletes’ transcripts like state secrets, but McCants included his in his filings. It showed that he’d received 10 A’s, six B’s one C and one D in the AFAM courses his coaches and team advisers recommended, and six C’s, one D and three F’s in courses he took outside the department.

                “When you go to college you don’t go to class, you don’t do nothing, you just show up and play,” McCants told one TV interviewer after filing his suit. “You’re not there to get an education, though they tell you that. You’re there to make revenue for the college—to put fans in the seats.”

                The “Alice In Wonderland” nature of the NCAA inquiry is seen in its definition of UNC’s no-show courses as a “benefit” to the athletes who received them, and in its failure to punish the school for them on grounds that some non-athletes also were permitted to enroll.   As a college freshman I might have thought that a free “A” was a wonderful thing, but the adults who ran the university and the panel that judged it knew better.

 Equally weird was the panel’s abdication on the simple and obvious point that anything amiss had taken place. “The NCAA defers to its member schools to determine whether academic fraud had occurred,” it stated, meaning, I guess, that in matters academic something is wrong only when the wrongdoer agrees it is. If this serves as a precedent, anything any unrepentant school does for or to its athletes in the classroom is off limits to future inquiry.

The span covered by the fraud included the terms five head football coaches at UNC and four head basketball coaches, including the late and sainted Dean Smith (1961-97) and the incumbent (and saint-to-be) Roy Williams, who was hired in 2003. It also covered the tenure of several top academic officers. Still, the only individuals singled out for rebuke in the probe were AFAM’s chairman and his secretary, both of whom are long gone from the university. They can be considered the equals of the hapless assistant coaches who typically take the brunt of the group’s sports penalties. The operative rule in college sports is the higher one ranks in an institution the less one is presumed to know, and the less responsibility one bears.

  Given its group’s history, the NCAA panel had plenty of precedence for ruling that classroom matters are none of its business; college sports long have been more about sports than about college. The case should have been the province of a national accrediting body, and UNC should have been labeled the diploma mill it was, or, maybe, still is.  You don’t hear much about those outfits, though, so college governance generally seems to be a lost cause.