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For about as long as we’ve had college athletics, we’ve been arguing about the correct way to marry college athletics and academics. From the days of Charles Eliot or Robert Maynard Hutchins trying to smother college football in the pre-WWII era, or more modern critics like Murray Sperber and various faculty groups, you’ve had voices in and outside of academia raise concerns that big time college sports is fundamentally incongruous with higher education.

Those conversations are still happening today. But amid legal challenges to the current collegiate athletics model, private equity and capital looking to potentially get involved, and the final embers of the traditional “amateur” notion slowly dying out, other well-meaning analysts have suggested that perhaps now is the time to formally pull the plug on the explicit connection between college and sports. Have Wasserman and Endeavor run the whole thing, make ‘em employees, and just pay the school an IP licensing fee, right?

Maybe that’s the way things will eventually end up going, and maybe that’s the best policy choice. But it isn’t the only potential path.

What if, instead of treating athletics and academics as oppositional forces…they were better integrated? What if they, from the biggest programs to the lowest low majors…actually worked together?

This isn’t a completely new concept. The debate over whether athletes should be able to major in their sport pops up every few years, (former NCAA president Myles Brand pitched this way back in 2006), and a few reform-minded academics have proposed other partnership possibilities even before that.

But a recent paper from Dr.Molly Harry of the University of Florida and Dr. Erianne A. Weight at UNC, caught my attention….because it doesn’t just argue for more explicit academic tie-ins to the athletic world, but provides meaningful examples of exactly how to do it, without compromising academic integrity.

But first, what do I mean when I talk about meaningful integration between athletics and academics?

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