For years, I've been opposed to athletic recruiting at elite academic institutions; it seems obvious to me that athletic accomplishment is but one factor that should be considered individually and in the process of building out a well-rounded student body. In particular, the prioritization of athletics over artistic, musical, and scientific excellence during the university recruiting process has always struck me as a quirk of history.
This quirk of history recently made the national news when investigators discovered that certain coaches were taking bribes from wealthy parents in order to push students through the recruiting process.
What confuses me isn't that this happened, but that university leadership didn't take this opportunity to modernize the system. This would have been the perfect catalyst to take a national stand and act with courage and intellectual fortitude in order to attempt to switch the Ivy League from Division I to Division III, or to remove itself from the NCAA entirely. Instead, university leaders took the path of least resistance, instituting minor and insignificant policy changes which do nothing to address the root cause of the problem: allowing college admissions to be warped by the need to recruit athlete-students rather than student-athletes.
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