It's not Penn State, or even Ohio State, but the latest college football scandal at UNC speaks volumes about how big time college athletics is run, even at non-factory schools.
Phony coursework and assignments for football players in the African-American studies department were so obvious that it should have been detected almost immediately, at least by the people providing academic oversight of the athletic department (this is nothing new, although easy courses for football players in my day were grounded a little more in the hard sciences, e.g. a "rocks for jocks" geology offering). Perhaps the fact that the courses were being taught by the head of the department (make that the "former" head of the department) provided a smokescreen for what was actually going on. But no one can read these accounts without thinking that the whole enterprise of major college athletics is corrupt and corrupting, from recruitment to graduation.
And it's that corruption and corrupting influence that we see on display now in Chapel Hill, and in State College, PA. Once a program sends the word that integrity doesn't matter, it's not much of a leap from wholesale academic fraud that no one bothers to report, to turning a blind eye to allegations of sexual assault.
There needs to be some serious housecleaning of this entire system.
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