The best and the dullest.

THE DUMB ATHLETE whose professors carry him like a sack of flour for four years has passed from joke to scandal, as college athletics has become a virtual subdivision of professional sports. (We particularly like the story of the basketball coach whose star center finished one semester with four Fs and a D. "Son," the coach remonstrated gently, "it looks to me like you're spending too much time on one subject.")

Now the NCAA has taken a modest step to tighten scholastic standards. A new rule would require athletes to have a 2.0 grade-point average and to score somewhat higher than a sea mollusk on standardized aptitude tests. Naturally, a chorus of coaches and civilrights advocates is attacking the rule as "racist," on the grounds that it would hit minority students (and they don't mean Asians) especially hard.

The interest of the coaches is clear. John Thompson of Georgetown wants the best basketball team money can buy, so to speak, and any scholastic standards, by their nature, will tend to limit his talent pool.

Civil-rights leaders are another matter. Nothing the Ku Klux Klan says could be as damaging as the reflexive reaction of black spokesmen against a rule that would apply equally to all dumb jocks, regardless of color. The automatic equation of poor students with blacks would be deemed a deadly insult if it were made by a hostile white. To call an impersonal standard "discriminatory" is to invite contempt and condescension.

Once upon a time, civil-rights leaders condemned racial double standards. Now they demand them, apparently with no thought of what they are implying about both their cause and their constituency. It's obvious that civil-rights leaders don't have to pass aptitude tests.