Matt Gelb wrote an interesting piece in Tuesday???s Daily Orange, one of the country???s finest campus newspapers.

Gelb discusses a culture in intercollegiate athletics that often encourages coaches to turn a blind eye toward the indiscretions of standout student-athletes. He cites specific cases from a number of institutions where coaches refused to jeopardize the team???s performance to duly reprimand a wayward player.

When I was in college, I had a teammate who ripped a paper off the Internet and turned it in as his own. He was caught and the school suspended him for a semester. As he was one of our top players, we welcomed him back with open arms to the baseball field the next semester. I was okay with the outcome because he had been punished in the same fashion as any other student who had violated the ethics code at Brandeis.

Preferential treatment for student-athletes, however, is wholly unacceptable. Gelb notes that Florida State penalized Peter Warrick with a slap on the wrist for his part in a shoplifting scandal in Tallahassee. Lavaranues Coles, who had partnered with Warrick in the scheme, was kicked out of school.

As a Syracuse fan, I often wondered why Billy Edelin was allowed to come back after each of his indiscretions. I didn???t wonder too hard, though, because it was pretty obvious that he was an excellent basketball player. Would other players have received the same treatment as Edelin? Would other students have been afforded the same benefit of the doubt? I hope, so but you really have to wonder.

The NCAA doesn???t have a bylaw that addresses legal matters of its student-athletes. The membership has decided not to legislate with regard to the law, and it is therefore the responsibility of law enforcement officials and institutional administration to properly admonish any student who engages in criminal activity. There should be no special treatment for student-athletes, but if you read some of the examples in Gelb???s article, it seems it has certainly happened more than once.