Put student-athletes at head of class

The governance of intercollegiate sports is an ongoing national embarrassment. Just last week, dozens of major universities took part in an unattractive scramble to realign their conference memberships in an effort to maximize their television revenue. While that greed-induced feeding frenzy was going on, the governing National Collegiate Athletic Association was hypocritically meting out severe punishment to Southern Cal largely because two of its "student athletes" had been accused of the same kind of self-enriching behavior that their school routinely engaged in with impunity.

The old ideal of the serious student who also is a fine amateur athlete has become progressively corrupted in recent decades, particularly in the top-rated football and basketball programs at roughly 100 universities. As television revenues and professional sports salaries have soared, these universities have taken to offering scholarships to athletes who have little interest in obtaining an education and, instead, view their increasingly brief tenures in higher education as a form of unpaid minor-league preparation for their future professional sports careers. In effect, universities now suit up unpaid mercenaries in their school colors, then cash in on their efforts.

There is nearly a complete disconnect at some universities between their academic missions and the practices of their athletic departments. At worst, the system amounts to the exploitation of vulnerable adolescents who, in fact, are likely to end up with neither a college degree nor a professional sports contract.

For a variety of financial, cultural and political reasons, all efforts to reform this corrupt system have failed and, realistically, are likely to fail in the future because the NCAA is dominated by large public colleges and universities whose alumni and governing legislatures have little appetite for change.

Nonetheless, a significant minority of NCAA members are increasingly uncomfortable with the status quo. In particular, such private universities as Stanford and Notre Dame have higher academic standards than most NCAA state schools, and they aspire to be seen more as peers of Ivy League colleges rather than of schools in, for example, the academically wanting Southeastern Conference that are increasingly dominating football (the sport where the big money is made). These private universities nonetheless continue to partake in the system, perhaps because they feel they have insufficient leverage to change it; and surely they would lose alumni support if they were to follow the Ivy League in abolishing athletic scholarships.