Oct 23, 2014 3 min read

The University of Michigan’s quarterback pushed back onto the playing field despite showing concussion symptoms. Tallahassee police looking the other way when Florida State University football players break the law. The University of Florida quarterback accused of rape. Fans marauding through Morgantown like Visigoths after an unexpected West Virginia University football victory.

We’re not even done with October yet, but it’s safe to say college football has not exactly enjoyed the most favorable publicity over the last couple of months. Could it possibly get any worse?

Yes.

Look no further than a report released Wednesday which found “student athletes” – the quotation marks are deliberate – at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill were funneled into courses that required pathetically little effort so they could maintain their eligibility in the school’s football and basketball programs.

Even though the University of North Carolina enjoys a reputation of being one of the top-tier public universities in the country, around 3,000 students received credit for classes in an African studies program where they signed up for classes that never met, were presided over by a professor they never once encountered, and required only a paper where the grading standards were – let’s say diplomatically – flexible.

So flexible, in fact, grades were often assigned after counselors were called to see what grade a student needed in order to stay eligible. In one instance, according to The New York Times, a “D” was given to a paper that cited no sources, seemed to have been recycled from another class and had “absolutely nothing” to do with the assigned topic. Another consisted largely of transcriptions of writings by activist Nikki Giovanni. Yet, the students were given passing grades and allowed to keep doing what, for the university, was their main duty – keeping the Tar Heels competitive.

“This is a very complex organization that needed oversight at every step of the way and it didn’t exist,” according to Kenneth Wainstein, the former federal prosecutor who led the study. “It’s pretty shocking that it didn’t exist … The bad actions of a few and the inaction of others failed the University’s students, faculty and alumni, and undermined the institution as a whole.”

The report’s results generated headlines over the last few days, but colleges and universities bending the rules for high-profile athletes is not an entirely new development. For instance, in the 1980s, Fred Davison, the president of the University of Georgia, was ousted from his job after it was shown athletes in remedial programs were being given passing grades they didn’t deserve; again, it was all about eligibility.

This is one of those crossroads where we need to make an honest appraisal of the role athletics play on our biggest, most prestigious campuses. The days when athletes were truly students who engaged in sports as a way to stay fit and enjoy the fellowship of fellow students is long past. College sports is a lucrative industry that pulls in big television contracts and yields donations from wealthy alumni. Some athletes are going to start receiving a small cut of that revenue, but the fundamental structure of college athletics will remain unchanged. Perhaps it’s time to surrender and acknowledge what many college and university sports programs actually are – minor league systems for professional sports.

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt led an effort to reform college sports. Close to 110 years later, it is apparent that another reform moment has arrived.