North Dakota State University was created as a land grant institution under the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890. That legislation granted 30,000 acres of federal land to each state allowing them to use it, or the proceeds from its sale, to establish educational institutions.

The purpose of those institutions was, per the original act, “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”

Missing from that definition of purpose is football. Or hockey. Or any mention of athletics at all.

That’s probably because the folks who passed the Morrill Land-Grant act, and who founded NDSU, had academics as their primary mission. Not winning football games.

Today, 125 years after the founding of NDSU, it can be hard to see those priorities. College athletics have become a big business that are often very distracting from the academic missions of institutions that play host to them.

At NDSU specifically, we’ve seen evidence of these priorities at work. Recently the university was griping that Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s executive budget for the 2015-2017 biennium contained no money for Dunbar Hall, a chemistry building at NDSU where fires have become a frequent problem.

Yes, fires.

At Harris Hall, also on the NDSU campus, researchers have to lug water because 60-year-old pipes don’t work. That’s right: NDSU is a world-class research institution where at least some of the researchers have to deal with a lack of running water.

These are issues that have been widely reported in the media, yet seem to have inspired little outrage in the public, or questions for NDSU’s administrators regarding priorities.

Would the same be true if Bison football players were forced to practice in a facility without running water that was prone to catching fire? Probably not.

Here’s another recent example of these poor priorities at work. During the 2013 legislative session lawmakers appropriated $29 million to the Challenge Fund. The fund makes grants matching private dollars raised for academic projects at the state’s universities.

The grants are overseen by a committee chaired by Lt. Gov. Drew Wrigley. In its first biennium of existence the fund used all of its appropriated dollars, including over $239,000 worth of grants, for six athletic scholarship funds at NDSU, as well as similar scholarship funds at Minot State University and Dickinson State University.

According to House Bill 1204, which created the Challenge Fund, matching grants were to be given “for projects dedicated exclusively to the advancement of academics.”

In defending the grants to athletic scholarships, Wrigley suggested that students recruited because of their athletic ability and given scholarships because of their athletic ability were really at the universities to pursue academics.

“It doesn’t get them a new football helmet or hockey stick or anything like that,” he told a Forum News Service reporter. “They’re not there to be football players, they’re there to be students, and you’ve got to have some way of paying for that tuition, fees and books.”

That’s a little hard to believe, especially when student athletes who stop being athletes or perform poorly lose their scholarships.

The dollars awarded to athletic scholarships so far are but a fraction of the $29 million appropriation to the Challenge Fund. For now, this is a small problem, but if the practice is allowed to continue, it’s not hard to believe that the Challenge Fund might be less about academics than football, hockey and basketball.

In other words, academics would be taking a back seat to athletics yet again. Is that what we want, especially as the cost of attending a university for the purposes of academics has become so fiscally prohibitive?

In what is a sad commentary on our national priorities, there are probably a lot of North Dakotans who do want that. But let’s hope, for the sake of education, that lawmakers fix this loophole before it is exploited further.