“In the collegiate model of sports, the young men and women competing on the field or court are students first, athletes second.”
That phrase is proudly written on the NCAA’s website, but in the University of North Carolina lawsuit, the non-profit organization is singing a different tune.
A lawsuit filed by former UNC athletes claims that the athletes never received a real education. The scandal at UNC involves thousands of athletes who, during an 18 year period, were enrolled into classes that never met, and were led by advisers who altered grades, accepted plagiarism and went about other ways of keeping athletes who were behind in classes eligible to play sports.
The NCAA recently announced that it has no legal responsibility “to ensure the academic integrity of the courses offered to student-athletes at its member institutions.”
“It’s our commitment – and our responsibility – to give young people opportunities to learn, play and succeed,” the NCAA’s website reads. “We release a report card for each Division I team each year called the Academic Progress Rate. If half or more of the student-athletes aren’t on track to graduate, that team is ineligible to participate in postseason play. That’s how seriously we take our commitment.”
Mary Willingham, the former athletics literacy counselor, originally shed light on the UNC academic scandal nearly five years ago. The university paid her $335,000 to settler her lawsuit after she claimed that her work environment became hostile, forcing her to resign from her job last spring.
According to CNN, Willingham said athletes across the country are accepted to colleges even though they’re academically unprepared and then pushed into classes where little work is required. The system of eligibility that the NCAA brags about, she said, is a sham.
“Why do we go through the trouble of compliance if we can’t legitimize that the courses are real and the education is real anyway? ” Willingham said. “It makes no sense. If they can’t legitimize that the academics are real and take no responsibility for that, then why certify students semester after semester to play? It’s lost its meaning for me.”
Rick Burton, professor of sport management at Syracuse University, takes the blame off of the NCAA and pushes it back onto the University of North Carolina.
“I understand, I think, where the NCAA is coming from,” Burton said to CNN. “We would not let the NCAA come in and tell us how to run our chemistry department at Syracuse University. It sounds like someone is trying to say the NCAA should have been supervising that department at the University of North Carolina, and there’s no logic to that. The people who are saying the NCAA should be held accountable for academics at every school are just looking for an opportunity to throw rocks at the NCAA.”
In my eyes, it’s hard to put all of the blame on either the NCAA or UNC. Should the University of North Carolina admit to their wrongdoing to these former athletes and make the needed adjustments to their academic programs? Absolutely.
Should the NCAA, who openly rallies behind the idea of “students first, athletes second” set stricter academic policies for their member institutions, and go so far as punishing UNC by deeming them ineligible for postseason play in the 2015-2016 athletic season? Maybe so.
The NCAA has kept alive the dreams for young adults to play collegiate athletics for years, but the NCAA should take a step forward and keep alive the dream for college athletes to receive the higher education that all young adults deserve.
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