The scandal over UNC’s secretive, duplicitous, and fraudulent system for recruiting star football and basketball players (who should often be enrolled in community colleges rather than a four-year university) and then keeping them eligible to play with a bag of tricks has been building for several years. Some faculty members wouldn’t accept the soothing reassurances from the top brass, including Chancellor Thorp, that everything would be done to get at the truth. They kept digging, suffering considerable opprobrium from faculty colleagues and administrators who just wanted to sweep everything under the rug and “move on.”

Two of them, Mary Willingham and Jay Smith, have penned an enlightening book about the affair entitled Cheated. In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I write about it.

At most of America’s big sports schools, officials pay lip service to academic excellence and insist that the players are getting a good — even “world class” — education. Sadly, the pressure to field winning football and basketball teams from hordes of alums who love to brag about how “their” teams have brought is just overwhelming for the coaches. Win and they get huge contracts; lose and they’re out. That leads to a lot of bending if not breaking of the recruiting rules. Once the coveted stars are enrolled, the athletics department turns its focus to maintaining their eligibility by placing them in as many easy courses as possible. Whether the educational needs of the players — often desperate — are met or not is immaterial.

Willingham and Smith go into great detail in showing how the athletics department gamed the system to keep star players eligible: fluff courses, bogus “independent study” courses, “help” from mentors who largely did the work expected of the “student-athletes” and so forth. Crucial to the success of the Eligibility Uber Alles operation was the indifference of the administration. Instead of vigilance, it took a snooze when it came to oversight, despite many red flags (such as huge numbers of “independent study” classes taught by a single professor). As the athletics department noticed that it was able to get away with a lot of fakery, it kept going further and further. Finally, however, it got caught.

The authors note that it wasn’t just the athletes at UNC who took advantage of faux courses. Word got around and many students who weren’t on any team signed up for courses that ensured them high grades for little work. The dry rot in UNC’s academic integrity began with the imperative of keeping star football and basketball players eligible, but spread outward.

Will anything be done? Cheated makes it much harder for university officials (at UNC and other big sports schools) to plausibly claim that they’re following the rules and that their stars really are student-athletes. But until the incentives change — both the incentives for schools to put athletic glory ahead of academic integrity and the incentives for the players to neglect learning in favor of the long-shot at playing pro ball — I think the kind of shenanigans Willingham and Smith have exposed will continue.