Dan Jenkins, You Should Be Living at This Hour

My first reaction to the news of the indictments for fraud involving college admissions was weariness. The scale of the the fraud was a mild surprise. Yet over the years there has been plenty of reporting on efforts to rig admissions for the well to do.

By the evening, though, I wished that Andrew Lelling could have announced the indictments in time for the late Dan Jenkins to have had a good laugh. Jenkins  tended--or so I read him--to regard universities as founded to be the marketing, facilities, and operations arms of football and basketball teams. He had, I thought, a distrust for any institution that might try to assert academic priorities. He was not wrong to see hypocrisy in NCAA rules. Whether the changes he had in mind would have removed the hypocrisy yet preserved college sports, I don't know.

I do think that Jenkins would have enjoyed this. The schools involved are mostly not the big Football Bowl Subdivision powers, unless Clemson, Alabama, and Ohio State are buried in the footnotes. Instead we have Stanford, Georgetown, and Yale. The sports are not the revenue sports of football and basketball--where it would be hard to hide an inferior athlete--but tennis, rowing, water polo. I wish I could have read his column on this.