Football and Swahili - NYTimes.com I was at the University of North Carolina when I heard the Swahili anecdote. It was at a luncheon organized by some faculty members who have become, like me, critics of the N.C.A.A. and the hypocrisy of college sports. Among those attending was a former Carolina football player named Deunta Williams. About halfway through lunch, the talk turned to the education. The University of North Carolina, mind you, is a place that professes to care a great deal about whether its athletes go to class - and earn a degree. And, of course, the N.C.A.A. claims - preposterously - that athletes are students above all else. Yet several of the professors complained that whenever an athlete enrolled in their classes, they got a letter from the athletic department asking them, in effect, to go easy on the player. After all, he was holding down a full-time job: playing football for the university. Williams, however, had his own set of complaints. Athletes, he said, could only take the classes the athletic department wanted them to take. Coursework couldn't interfere with practice, of course. It was always better that the classes not be too difficult - otherwise, there might be eligibility problems. And one other thing: "All the freshman football players take Swahili as their language requirement," Williams said. Because the athletic department tutors are strong in Swahili. I've been thinking about that Swahili story a lot these days. Over the past few months, as I've tackled the problems with college sports - and called for players to be paid, instead of serving as free labor in a multibillion-dollar industry - many readers and bloggers have responded by pointing to the presumed value of the free education they're getting. Some have argued that the right answer is for universities to de-emphasize athletics. Others have said that schools should stop accepting athletes, no matter how talented, who lack the skills to do college-level work. Just last week, Bob Costas, the estimable NBC sportscaster, devoted two hours of airtime to the state of college sports. I was one of the panelists. A half-dozen times, he asked whether it was right for schools to enroll athletes who couldn't handle the academic requirements of college. I have come to believe that that is the wrong question. Yes, the world would be a better place if universities were not trying to manage a huge entertainment complex "on the side." But schools with big-time football and basketball programs are not acting irrationally. In additional to the millions of dollars such programs reap, they can put a school on the map, making it more attractive to potential applicants. A good college team can bind together a campus like nothing else. In playing for the team, the athletes are giving their schools more immediate value than anyone else in the student body. They are also doing something that requires at least as much skill as playing in a university orchestra. Even putting aside the question of pay, surely the university ought to feel a moral obligation to return the favor by giving the players the tools to succeed in life. Instead, universities do the opposite. With their phony majors and low expectations, they send the unmistakable message to the athletes that they don't care what happens after their eligibility expires. It's a disgrace. Instead, why not allow football players to major in, well, football? This is a solution put forth by John Kilbourne, a professor of movement science at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Kilbourne, a former dance major, points out that college dancers can focus almost exclusively on the thing they are passionate about - even though the vast majority will not ultimately be professional dancers. Why is it so terrible to think of a football player doing likewise? Surely they could get more from a course in, say, "racism and football" than in most of what they are now forced to take. There is another way to come at this. It requires tossing the "student-athlete" pretense overboard and being honest about the revenue-generating role athletes play - and the fact that many are ill equipped to do college work. Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sports management at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has proposed "reimagining" the college system to acknowledge that football and basketball players are employees first and students a distant second. In her model, players would get paid something - and if they chose to pursue a college education, that would be an extra benefit. If they needed remedial reading and math instead of Shakespeare, the university would provide that, even if it didn't ultimately lead to a college degree. "All of the problems in college sports stem from one root cause," she told me recently. It is all built on a lie. Until we acknowledge that lie, the freshman football players will be studying Swahili.