On Friday morning — 17 days after the college basketball world was shaken to its core with the arrest of 10 people involved in the sport, including top-tier assistant coaches and shoe-company executives — the NCAA washed its hands of an investigation into academic misconduct within the University of North Carolina athletic department that began seven years ago. Instead of coming down with the hammer, taking down banners and reinforcing that there is still some holiness left in this unholy marriage between academics and athletics, the NCAA said, basically, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.”
The dichotomy of these two simultaneous cases — the UNC case and the FBI case — is stunning.
For nearly two decades, UNC had, according to a university investigation, offered a “shadow curriculum” of so-called “paper classes.” These classes, nearly 200 in total, required no attendance and only one paper. Some 3,100 students attended these paper classes, with some 1,500 student-athletes — ahem, “student-athletes” — being steered into these classes.