I actually do agree that the NCAA shouldn't have any say in this matter. If the school had junk classes and junk degrees that were available to all students, it isn't an extra benefit to athletes(NCAA's area of authority). However, SACS should have yanked the entire school's(sic) accreditation. As far as I am concerned, UNC is basically no different than all of the degree mill for profit so called schools. If you have a degree from a school with such academic malfeasance, it should not count for: medical licensing, Bar Association membership, etc. I would even be happy if the ACC kicked them out of the conference. Unfortunately, the ACC let another less than academic institution in a few years ago to prop up football.
Ordinarily, I would agree with you...but did you read the full report that came out a couple years back, about what had been going on? It was pretty well-documented that it all started out when a staff member (NOT faculty) who was also an alumnus
and admitted booster started taking advantage of her position (and lax supervision within her department) to create sham courses specifically for players, and assigning passing grades for them on the basis of ridiculously low expectations (i.e, writing a single grade-school level report). She had no authority to create the course (in an absent faculty member's name) or to assign grades for it. IIRC, they even documented that this individual met with AA staff—purportedly, with one or more head coaches in attendance—to discuss the potential fallout of university policy changes that might affect her ability to continue manufacturing these classes. I believe that at one point the "course offerings" were not even publicized through UNC's usual course catalog & registration procedures--they were only advertised via fliers available in the AA building. It was only as time passed that knowledge of these courses spread, through word of mouth, to the student body as a whole.
So it wasn't "UNC offering junk classes"--it was a booster acting behind the university's back to
subvert standard academic policy—with the knowledge of he AA, who
directed athletes to this person—as a way
to keep athletes eligible. That is, without a doubt, an impermissible benefit. The fact that general student body eventually caught on to the existence of these courses does not mean that the initial implementation, and the subsequent,
systematic, use of this mechanism to keep players eligible, was not an NCAA infraction.
As I understand it, UNC is already taking a lot of heat from university accreditation boards (SACS, in particular) for the laxness of their oversight of the African-American Studies department. From what I heard, the university as a whole was put on probationary status, which is the last step before revoking accreditation—so it's a pretty big deal, and I have no doubt that UNC's academic programs are spending a lot of time right now jumping through hoops to prove their academic accountability. But the fact that the university also has its hands dirty in this mess does not mean that the AA should get off the hook—they
knowingly exploited the school's accountability gap to keep players eligible.
