Sally Dear, an adjunct lecturer at Binghamton University had had enough. Three of her students — each a varsity athlete on the men’s basketball team — were consistently disrupting her class. They sent text messages that they claimed were to their coach, they left early, arrived late or simply did not show up at all. Dear, who had taught at Binghamton for 11 years, went public with her frustration with the school's athletic department. Then, two weeks ago, she was fired.

“I felt pressure to cut them breaks that weren’t available to other students,” Dear told The New York Times in February in an article about Binghamton’s basketball team, which advanced to Division I in 2001. In the story, Dear recalled how she once tried to lower a player's grade in accordance with her attendance policy — which stipulated that missing more than three classes warranted a course grade to drop by one letter value — when an associate athletics director tried to dispute her authority to do so.

Though the university now claims that Dear was fired due to budget cuts, we refuse to ignore blatant prioritization of athletics over academics, and we hope the State University of New York will recognize Binghamton’s wrong-doings.

Dear wasn't only standing up to defend the skirmishes she ran into with her students. Her plight shed light on an athletic program gone awry. Currently, the program is under review by SUNY after six players got kicked off of the team. One former player is fighting drug charges. Another is charged with assaulting a 66-year-old woman while stealing condoms from Wal-Mart. Another former player fled to Serbia after posting bail on charges for beating one of his peers into a coma at a bar.

We are disgusted that Binghamton has allowed athletics to taint its academic reputation to boast its athletic standings. As a result, its recruitment practices must be reconsidered. We hope that a review of Binghamton’s recruitment policies will encourage the program to consider the person, more so than simply the player, that they recruit.

We know Binghamton is not an isolated case of a school putting the athlete ahead of the scholar. Athletics generates revenue for colleges across the nation, and thus the preferential treatment of athletes is never that surprising. For Binghamton, its recruitment tactics meant winning the American East tournament and qualifying for the NCAA for the first time in the school’s history.

We appreciate that Ivy League regulations have historically sought to preserve academics in college athletics. Though we are content to believe that what is unfolding at Binghamton will not happen here, we hope the situation at our neighbor school will cause other institutions of higher education to reconsider their practices.