Students-athletes who shirk academics pose a problem, but so do students who shirk athletics. The latter problem is more pervasive. You can take a hard line against academic administrators who enable athletes to avoid difficult classes, but remember that few colleges discourage students from avoiding athleticism. The typical physical-education requirement is the mirror image of all those lightweight (name your academic discipline)-for-jocks courses.

The temptation for those who were good students but poor athletes is to hold up their identity as the norm. They insist that the poor student who is a good athlete should have to work to become a better student, but it’s fine with them if a good student remains sedentary or ignorant of sports. Critics of college sports clearly congregate on one side of the jock–nerd divide that shapes the social life of male students and imprints their psyches permanently. If the conventional wisdom is true, that the jocks tend to peak socially in late adolescence and early adulthood, the nerds peak later — and when they do, they sometimes use their newly acquired social standing, in academe and elsewhere, to put the jocks in their place.

Is it a violation of Title IX that the student-athletes in question are mostly male? Many faculty, administrators, students, and alumni disapprove of what they see as a bunch of dumb guys getting paid under the table to perform for lucrative sports teams that are unrelated to the mission of higher education. For many colleges and universities, their football or men’s basketball team are their most public face. The prominence of these “men in groups” in the life of the institution violates the liberal pieties, which include strong doses of feminism, that make up the political orthodoxy on college campuses.

Military recruiting was banned on some campuses beginning with the Vietnam War, because the default setting for campus culture was anti-war. Then the reason shifted to LGBT issues. The common thread over the generations has been a culture war against “patriarchy,” a concept in which a host of anti-social behaviors are conflated with maleness itself. Against that background, the high-profile team sports sponsored by your school’s athletic department will appear irredeemably tainted with “male original sin,” as Lionel Tiger has dubbed it.

Students who are not good at sports and never will be would benefit from trying. A friend whose son was of the smartest-guy-in-his-class sort described to me once how much he liked playing for his school’s baseball team. He sat on the bench a lot but didn’t mind. His ego was more than adequately fed in the classroom, where he was always a star among peers. Here was his opportunity to be just a guy among some guys.

Ian Tuttle is right that students should meet minimum academic requirements even if they play sports, but the definition of academic requirements should be broadened to include sports, both knowledge of them and some experience at playing them. I admire Ian’s boldness in stating that athletics should be “subordinate to intellectual pursuits,” but I would take that sentiment and revise it along these lines: Athleticism and intellectuality are increasingly segregated in educational environments, and instead of kicking out the athletes who aren’t intellectual enough, encourage the intellectuals in their native athleticism, even if it’s modest, and in their appreciation for the intellectually demanding — exhausting, even — aspect of sports.