Opinion: NCAA can’t have it both ways on academics

In the days leading up to the conclusion of March Madness, the NCAA’s most popular and lucrative event, the Association responded to a lawsuit brought by former UNC athletes claiming to have been deprived of the education UNC had promised them.

The NCAA’s response made clear that it felt it had no obligation to ensure its athletes received a quality education.

Balderdash. If the NCAA is to continue insisting the scholarships players receive are sufficient and just compensation for the services they render, it has every responsibility to make sure that compensation is actually delivered.

The NCAA’s abdication of responsibility for academic quality would be roughly equivalent to McDonald’s claiming it has no business checking to see if its franchises pay their employees in Monopoly money.

Of course, we do not think in the slightest that an academic scholarship should be considered complete compensation for athletes who make millions upon millions of dollars for the NCAA and its member institutions. We also agree that the NCAA does not have the moral standing to enforce standards of academic quality.

In this sense, we are somewhat pleased to see it acknowledge, in its way, the limits of its mandate. But the coupling of this understanding with complete inaction is impossible to endorse.

The NCAA could perhaps be forgiven for clinging to outdated understandings of amateurism and the romance of the student-athlete ideal, as it has done for years.

But its apparent apathy toward safeguarding the collegiate model’s strongest moral argument suggests the NCAA knows full well that it is both misguided and infeasible to yoke academic study to revenue athletics. Instead of making attempts to right this wrong, however, it has simply allowed the problem to fester.

The NCAA’s response to this lawsuit directly contradicts most of its literature, past and present, which has emphasized the association’s role in “equipping (student-athletes) with the skills to succeed on the playing field, in the classroom and throughout life.”

It seems to us as though the NCAA is capitalizing on the same logic that some at UNC have used to distance the school’s athletic programs from the academic fraud that occurred here.

Both the NCAA and UNC have attempted to compartmentalize the wrong-doing to specific academic departments and gloss over the structural incentives for fraud that persist in any model of collegiate sports where athletic eligibility is tied to academic performance.

Of course, even if the NCAA were to adhere to the responsibilities implied by its business model, there would be a practical limit to how it could intervene on behalf of student-athletes’ education. But in UNC’s case, where fraud seems to have been directly connected to the NCAA’s eligibility standards, any morally defensible approach requires action of some kind.