American College Sports Are a Total Fraud

The NCAA recently presented the latest findings in the University of North Carolina’s unfolding athletics scandal. A large number of students, mostly football and basketball players, were given course credit for phony “paper” courses that had no instructor, never met, and had no requirements other than a written paper, many of which were themselves phony. According to various investigations and reports, these phony courses were offered for almost 20 years, their existence was well known to athletic department personnel, and the arrangement was tacitly accepted by university officials. (All the relevant head coaches, athletic directors, etc. have denied all knowledge of the issue.)

Many commentators have used the scandal to highlight the hypocrisy and absurdity of major collegiate athletics programs at US universities. The critics are right; the athletics programs at Division I schools should be spun off into independent, nonprofit (or for-profit) entities that, if they desire, license the brand (nickname, colors, fight song, etc.) from an associated university. If students and alumni at Ohio State or Notre Dame (and, yes, even Stanford or Duke) want to cheer for players wearing their school colors, they are free to do so. Some of these college-affiliated teams could be minor-league outlets for a local professional team. Others might evolve into independent club teams with only a distant connection to the affiliated university. But we should give up the pretense, known to all inside and outside these programs, that the typical D-I football or basketball player is a regular college student, there to get an education while engaging in limited extracurricular activities, like a biology major who plays the violin on the side.

There is another issue that has not gotten as much attention, however. All the paper classes were given in a single department, the Department of African and Afro-American Studies (recently renamed African, African American, and Diaspora Studies). They are attributed to one faculty member, former department chair Julius Nyang’oro (who has since left UNC), who allegedly went along with the scheme at the urging of a former assistant, Debbie Crowder, who set up the classes out of sympathy for the athletes, who were struggling to remain academically eligible). No one is really surprised by this. Universities with D-I sports have long steered football and basketball players, who generally have much lower academic qualifications than other students, into nontraditional, less-demanding majors like Afro-American Studies, Education, Communications, and the like. Is it any coincidence that the UNC scandal didn’t involve professors and phony courses in physics, art history, or economics? If star athletes were routinely getting As and Bs in chemical engineering or epistemology or plant pathology, you can bet it would have raised eyebrows. But As in criminal justice or social work or “general studies”? Meh.

Moreover, the stifling climate of political correctness at today’s universities gives a hedge of protection to “diversity” faculty and their departments and programs. Who would be willing to challenge the African-American head of the Afro-American studies department over its lax standards for primarily African-American students? This would be a near-suicidal move for most faculty members.

Anyway: Should these nontraditional and less-demanding majors, departments, and programs be bundled, within the larger university structure, with the conventional academic disciplines? Should we have “universities” at all, as opposed to more narrowly specialized teaching and research institutions? What about vocational and professional schools such as business, nursing, law, agriculture, medicine, and engineering? Would they be better as free-standing entities, rather than subsidiaries of giant academic conglomerates?

These are difficult questions, ones that do not get asked enough. The answers are complex. For one thing, it’s not obvious what counts as a “traditional” academic subject. Economics, sociology, and political science would not have been on the curriculum in Aristotle’s day, or Adam Smith’s. Moreover, some “academic” subjects, such as moral philosophy or jurisprudence, have obvious “vocational” aspects, while professional subjects like finance or neuroscience have clear academic components. Publicly financed universities — basically all colleges and universities in the US, even the nominally private ones like MIT or Northwestern — have been charged with a public outreach mission as well as an educational one (the land-grant colleges being the most obvious example). Should they meet this mission by diversifying across disciplines, curricula, and program design, or by adopting a more focused strategy? After all, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.