A LATTER DAY MINSTREL SHOW? So much for the student in student-athlete.

[Oregon neurobiologist and co-chairman of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics Nathan] Tublitz concedes that there's only so much that the NCAA can do [to maintain some integrity in intercollegiate sports]. The bigger problem is with a sports-mad American culture that doesn't care how college athletes are admitted, if they graduate, or if they ever make it to the NBA. All most fans care about, he says, is winning championships -- whatever the cost.

"You have to stop the drift away from academics, and our universities are the standard-bearers for maintaining academic standards," Dr. Tublitz said. "Thus it seems appropriate for our universities to be the first in line to say we should reverse this cultural trend and not continue to look the other way when students are accepted primarily for their athletic prowess."

More important, schools aren't doing these kids any favors by admitting them when it's unlikely that they will succeed academically. "We bring in 17-year-old kids, some of them from the inner city," he said. "We wine and dine them. They have female chaperones. We put them up in fancy hotels. They come here and see an incredibly fancy locker room with individual TV screens, air conditioning and videogames. They go in and see the new football stadium and the new $200 million basketball arena. They see a medical training facility that is stunningly beautiful with waterfalls, treadmill pools, and state-of-the-art medical and dental equipment.

"They come here and are treated like royalty. Until they break a leg or get put on the second string and then they get set aside. Many don't earn a degree. They don't have the training or the skills to be independent after they leave the university. They're lost."

Indeed, only about 3% of high-school basketball players will get a Division 1 scholarship. And less than 3% of those who do will have a meaningful NBA career. "What about the 97%?" Dr. Tublitz asks. "We need to give them the tools to succeed beyond athletics, and we're not doing that."

And, of course, many of these kids are African-American. "It's no coincidence that basketball has the lowest APR," Dr. Tublitz said. "One of the major determinants of college success is socioeconomic status. Kids from privileged backgrounds, on average, do better. As educators, we need to make sure that those kids from underprivileged backgrounds are given the skills to achieve their potential. We need to put more resources into that group of students."

In fact, the trend is just the opposite. According to a report last year in the Journal of Sports Management, alumni giving at the nation's 100 biggest athletic departments was up significantly, while academic giving at the same schools remained flat. That's a significant shift. In 1998, athletics gifts accounted for 14.7% of all donations. By 2003, the figure had increased to 26%.

With these increased donations, often comes increased pressure to win. "There's a correlation between Oregon's attempt to have winning teams and the quality of students that they have to attract in order to achieve that goal," Dr. Tublitz said of his own campus. "This is not rocket science. It's not neuroscience. There are many extremely talented athletes for whom academics is not their primary goal at university. The fact that many people are OK with that says a lot about who we are and what we value."

The flip side of the positional arms race in sports, academic integrity excluded, is the positional arms race for prestige degrees, sports standing irrelevant. See University Diaries for more from Professor Tublitz on Oregon's academic slippage. The Berkeleys and the Northwesterns and the Carletons don't have to come for the students; they can win by default. They can come for the faculty, particularly if the faculty have sponsored research to bring.