… as your university’s faculty continues to game the athlete-eligibility system (The Tragic Fates of Petee and Boxill are possibly staying your jockshop’s hand of late), do not worry. Do not waste one sporty moment worrying that a rich enterprising country like yours will be at a loss to fashion new forms of system-gaming in order to keep the quarterback on the field 24/7.

In fact, La Nouvelle Vague is already firmly in place… It’s been there, really, all the time! Like that scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz when Glinda tells Dorothy “You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.” Ever since universities discovered online courses, the eligibility problem has been solved. You yourself might have taken one or two of these in college – to pass that pesky statistics requirement without learning statistics, for instance… Some anonymous grad student drudge (or the drudge’s designated-drudge – there’s of course no way to know who’s actually giving and who’s actually taking an online course) cluttered your computer screen with messages for a few weeks, and you (or your friend who knows statistics) wrote back, and then you passed statistics.

Because online courses are profitable (you can enroll zillions of students at a time and pay the drudge or whoever doodoo), most American universities are as we speak enlarging their offerings like mad. No one’s going to notice the athlete-component of this vast enterprise.

Online is in every way a cleaner solution than independent study. There’s absolutely no messy wasteful human interaction with online, whereas under the ancien régime, Julius Nyang’oro had to meet the athletes and frat guys at least once, if only to inform them they’d never see him again. Nor is there, with online, any noticeable record of your having done the humanly impossible – conducted in one semester three traditional classroom courses plus 150 independent studies. (Petee’s downfall came when one of his colleagues for some reason got wind of his teaching schedule and found it… odd enough to report him.) With online, you can have 5,000 students in five classes and no one will look at you twice. Everyone understands that responsibility for online classes at the American university is far too diffuse and complex (tons of people have a hand in any online course: there’s the instructor, the instructor’s assistants, the on-campus tech group, the for-profit company overseeing implementation and management features, university administrators doing various forms of surveillance, etc., etc.) for anyone to understand what’s going on. Online courses have evolved to the point where they run themselves. They’re animated templates, perpetuum mobiles whose first note merely needs to be struck in order for the whole thing to beautifully play itself out.