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It’s no dramatic overstatement to stay that the highest tier of National Collegiate Athletic Association sports is often a soulless, corrupt machine that awards those who profit off of it illegally while depending (and sometimes punishing) the student athletes who supply it with labor. Education, justice and the lives of unaffiliated students (particularly women) often weather collateral damage as the system grinds on. The events of the last day bear witness.
The University of North Carolina, whose basketball team is a perennial contender in the NCAA tournament, has just come out the other end of a long investigation relatively unscathed. The Athletic Association was investigating whether the highly rated educational institution had created low-impact, easy classes with the specific aim of helping players retain their eligibility. In the NCAA system, if student athletes fail to maintain certain grade levels or obtain a certain number of course credits, they are ineligible for play.
UNC was under investigation for five Level I charges from the NCAA stemming from the use of „paper courses“ — independent-study classes that sometimes didn’t require attendance and allowed great latitude for cheating — African and Afro-American Studies department from 2002 and 2011. Attended by athletes disproportionally, some of these courses were mislabeled as lectures, some did not meet university standards for work and others collected accusations of teachers being specifically told to pass student athletes who would otherwise fail.
All in all, if the charges were true, it would mean that UNC had created a system that would have kept student athletes playing while almost necessarily preventing them from actually learning.
