Academic scandals are an occasional and troubling feature in big time college sports. But as important as they are, they can also distract us from far more systemic issues where college sports meet college education.
Scandals can be shocking. For instance, last week the NCAA revealed its latest allegations against the University of North Carolina where over a period of 18 years, hundreds of fake classes were offered to thousands of students, many of them scholarship athletes. Gerald Gurney, a University of Oklahoma professor and president of the Drake Group for Academic Integrity in College Sport said that "UNC is the mother of all academic fraud violations, there's no doubt in my mind about cooperation of friendly faculty and the cover-up.