… why the NCAA could care less about the rampant academic corruption at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (some background here). Both consider it odd that this year’s most extensive, most comically brazen case of intellectual prostitution at a sports school holds no interest at all for that organization.
[A]s an offshoot of [yet another] NCAA investigation [into corruption at Chapel Hill], a UNC internal probe found that 54 AFAM classes were either “aberrant” or “irregularly” taught from summer 2007 to summer 2011. That included unauthorized grade changes, forged faculty signatures on grade rolls and limited or no class time.
But did the athletics department put pressure on players or the instructor? If not, the NCAA isn’t interested.
[W]hen it comes to the legitimacy of classwork done on a college campus, where technically the NC(as in collegiate)AA has some sway, it lets the individual institutions police themselves… Essentially, the hook in this case is that there is no proof that a coach or athletic department official coerced Nyang’oro [chair of African American Studies] to make lunch meat out of his curriculum for the benefit of the athletes enrolled.
… Pushing athletes to particular majors or even classes — clustering, if you will — while perhaps distasteful, isn’t in and of itself fraudulent. Pushing athletes to classes that were deemed “aberrant” by an internal university probe due to grade changes and forgeries is an entirely different matter.
So I guess this is the NCAA’s philosophy: If you’re simply a cruddy school that doesn’t care about educating your athletes, that’s your business.