Joe Nocera, business correspondent for the New York Times, has been on a tear recently, blasting the National Collegiate Athletic Association for being petty and tyrannical in ways that harm individual students, even as major colleges have used sports and their athletes as money makers.

He says that the people who tend to run afoul of the NCAA’s rules are the poor who often do not have the money to take their children on recruiting trips the way that more affluent parents can. As a result, they often have to turn to friends for help and thus run a far greater risk of breaking a rule, at least in a technical sense.

Colleges, even elite and powerful ones, submit to the NCAA’s decrees. One of his recent broadsides is aimed at Harvard’s lack of an aggressive defense when the NCAA invoked a bizarre rule that denied one of its female basketball players one year of eligibility.

The box inserts in his article links to the other cases he has written about.