The recent decision to let junior guard Jamar Smith redshirt for the 2007-08 basketball season is an insult to true Illini fans and emblematic of a culture in which standards are treated merely as a limbo stick.

Back in February the underage Smith, while heavily intoxicated with tequila, was driving a car carrying fellow Illini player Brian Carlwell. That car crashed into a tree, leaving Carlwell in a perilous medical state. Smith then left the scene of the accident and returned to the apartment complex where they had been without calling police or an ambulance. Only later did witnesses alert authorities.

Smith pleaded guilty in an agreement with prosecutors in the spring to aggravated DUI and served a two-week jail sentence in the summer. Now a felon, he is on probation for two years and required to complete community service and pay a fine.

This incident follows previous criminal behavior by former Illini Rich McBride who not only was implicated with Luther Head and Aaron Spears in a burglary and never charged, but was also arrested in September 2006 for DUI. That followed the April 2006 arrest of now senior center Shaun Pruitt for assaulting an employee of The Clybourne.

The administration and the athletic department’s failure to hold high profile students like these accountable for their egregious and illegal behavior is intolerable. To continue to allow figures like Smith the honor of wearing the Illini uniform is a slap in the face to every student and fan who comes to Assembly Hall to support the team.

And of course, it’s a fair bet that if one of those student fans was involved in the kind of reckless behavior that some of our most prominent athletes have engaged in, they wouldn’t enjoy such lenience from coaches, much less administrators.

While a double standard seems to exist in student discipline, it appears that there is a double standard among athletes as well.

There is little to reconcile between how two football players were kicked off the team last semester by Coach Ron Zook for being charged with residential burglary and how Smith, after being convicted of a felony, will not only remain with the basketball team but also enjoy a de facto paid campus vacation with funds that could be given to more deserving athletes or students.

While our athletic programs continue to endure criminal behavior and academic mediocrity as evidenced by today’s news that a new freshman recruit has been declared ineligible, the entire University suffers.

Until administrators and coaches decide to get proactive, we are left to wonder if someone literally has to die before this environment of tolerance ends.