That's a good column (in terms of logic) and a horrifically bad column (in terms of ethics). It takes the escalator.
Just because the NCAA's values are warped doesn't mean you should warp your values. Now, I'm not mounting a defense of Calhoun since I don't know him or what he did. For all I know he left everything up to Ted Taigen back when there were no repercussions for poor scores. I do know this: playing the "academic game," as DiMauro defines it, hurts learning. Tracking kids, giving them courses to stay eligible (courses that prevent them from proceeding into majors, etc.) is not the high road.
On the other hand, that's a much better article than Jacobs could have written.
