Well, maybe not so much when it comes to pedophilia, but academics? Hells, yeah!
If you really want to get a handle on how cramped this approach is, check out this baby step:
McDavis said in a recent interview with The Associated Press the committee has already agreed that any time a coach or paid member of the school’s athletic staff is involved in an academic-misconduct case the NCAA should be involved.
‘Ya think?
Too bad nobody’s paying players to work hard in the classroom. The NCAA would be all over that shit in a New York minute.
Get The Picture 
Institutional autonomy sho did rain on Chapel Hill. While the NCAA is hardly a paragon of enforcement stability, it seems to me somebody other than the schools have to be involved in academic misconduct investigations.
The schools simply have too much to lose when their academic reputation is involved. Having someone else take a second look at a situation adds a layer of legitimacy…even if the second eyes belong to the NCAA.
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Notice the hypocrisy in McDavis’s statement concerning player injury. If he blows out a knee, that player will no longer be held to academic standards by the NCAA. What tha’… .? The entire idea is to promote academics is it not? He should be held to a higher standard with more time available to study and do better classroom work, not have an excuse to not have his classroom performance counted.
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Wonder if he is considering a mandate for Freshman Ineligibility placed in there to please his neighboring Big 10 buddies?
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Let’s say that as a department I assign 200 freshmen to 10 teaching assistants, 20 per assistant. I give these assistants, most of them fresh out of college, a two week crash course in teaching, most of which concentrates on avoiding the sorts of behaviors that could get the school sued, such as sexual harassment awareness. I then give these teaching assistants a syllabus and a grade book. I also assign them a full course load. I also make them do research for faculty. I pay them monthly, enough to cover about 90% of their tuition. These teaching assistants show up unprepared most of the time, since they handle their own coursework first, their faculty research assignments second, and their teaching job third. Most grade randomly, especially if most of the course work is writing. No comma errors? A+!
Is that a college level class? No professor. No one with any qualifications other than a college degree grading the work. No one in charge of the class who cares anything beyond avoiding a student complaint, which means a whole lot of grade inflation. How is that legit?
What about the professor who holds discussion groups on the quad and thinks grade scales are oppressive? Is that legit?
The NCAA can’t figure out its current rule book. Expanding academic certification is so beyond their means it’s ridiculous.
The larger problem here is that most larger universities are built around a research culture, not a teaching culture. Once you step back from the romanticized outrage over UNC, what happened there in the AfAm department is only a half-step removed from what passes as undergrad education on a lot of campuses.
The “whistleblower” in the UNC saga got her masters degree online from UNC-G in 2009 and plagiarized her thesis, which strongly suggests someone checked a box that she submitted a paper weighing more than 6 ounces. And as someone who went back to school for an undergrad certification and then grad school, I can attest that academic rigor varied course to course by extremes. I switched my grad department after taking a joke of a course and hearing from others that a lot of the other courses in that department were similar “check the box, get your A” deals.
Again, the NCAA is not wading into this mess. They are drawing a brighter line specifically so they don’t.
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