No news, but a take on the UNC academic scandal:
=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fsports&action=click&contentCollection=sports®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0
Such glorious days these are for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. The
basketball team is in the Final Four, a championship so close as to put the campus
into a state of vibration. And Roy Williams, their down home coach, finds himself
celebrated for hill country wit and hoops acumen.
Rival coaches bow as his acolytes.
“When it all shakes out,” Gonzaga Coach Mark Few said, “he’ll be one of the
Mount Rushmore types in college coaching.”
I’d genuflect myself, if only I could administer a mind wipe.
Amid the blueandwhite pompoms, few are so rude as to mention that the
University of North Carolina, the Microsoft of college basketball, remains enmeshed
in a scandal of spectacular proportions. Put simply, for two decades until 2013, the
university provided fake classes for many hundreds of student athletes, most of them
basketball and football players.
Coach Williams’s longtime man Friday, Wayne Walden, a former academic
counselor, played switchman, steering basketball players to these classes. A touch of
plagiarism, a noshow, were O.K. if it gave the young man more time to work on his
drop step. There was one goal: Keep those gradepoint averages at the minimum
needed to compete for the university.
The N.C.A.A. gumshoes have recently awakened from their slumber and, in
December, filed a tough set of accusations against the university, the latest in an
investigation bending and twisting — some might say stalling — during the past few
years.
University officials take great umbrage at this. They claim to have investigated
thoroughly. This is nonsense. I waded through their reports, and it was like watching
a reluctant striptease.
The first reports, declared definitive by top administrators, found a problem
with a professor and an administrator in the department in question, African and
AfroAmerican studies. No one else knew, not the athletic director, the dean, or the
army of tutors and athletic support personnel. “Aberrant” and “irregular,” the
report’s authors harrumphed. Sleepy N.C.A.A. officials signed off: No real scandal
here; let’s move on.
Emails show, however, that behind the scenes, the university officials and board
members knew that the misconduct extended deeper. The chairman of the Board of
Governors wrote in an email that he had repeatedly asked administrators to purge
people who were involved in “fake classes.”
“Their inability to answer this basic question undermines their credibility,” he
wrote.
It’s important to stop here and bow in the direction of one newspaper, The
News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., and its reporter on the story, Dan Kane, who took
to the scent like the finest of bloodhounds. He exposed nearly every corruption,
including the emails mentioned here.
University officials reacted in timehonored fashion: They heaped abuse on the
reporter and the paper, accusing them of vox populi scandalmongering. Nor did the
university appreciate faculty members who had the temerity to ask why a top
academic institution tolerated decades of terrible education for its athletes.
A historian, Jay Smith, has written a book, “Cheated,” on this case, and recently
taught a class: “BigTime College Sports and the Rights of Athletes, 1956 to the
Present.” Students loved it; his classroom was filled. Last fall, the university canceled
the class for a year.
“It’s very disillusioning to live through the last six years here,” Smith told me.
“The university is operating like a crime family, and it shows the lengths to which
they will go to protect their athletic machine.”
Administrators finally commissioned a thorough report by Kenneth Wainstein,
a former United States assistant attorney general, in 2014. The dimensions of the
scandal he unearthed were daunting.
He reported that 3,100 students had received one or more semesters of lousy
instruction and that poor work found reward in high grades. Student athletes,
particularly those from the “revenue sports” — basketball and football — were
steered to these poor or nonexistent courses, and in some cases, they were told they
could sleep in class.
Many shared in the dirty secrets.
“Beyond those university personnel who were aware of red flags,” Wainstein
wrote, “there were a large number among the Chapel Hill faculty, deans and athletics
personnel, who knew that there were easygrading classes with little rigor.”
“Little rigor” is a term of art that begs for definition.
Wainstein asked three outside experts to look at a sample of class papers. They
found that in 40 percent of the papers, onequarter or more of the content was
plagiarized. The average grade for those papers was close to an Aminus.
It is worth noting that The News & Observer unearthed concrete evidence of
worse, which is to say that athletes were given classes and “independent studies”
that flatout did not exist. And Rashad McCants, a former player on the Tar Heels’
basketball team, said that tutors regularly wrote papers for students. A number of
his teammates have disputed this.
As always, mum was the word. Wainstein notes that many administrators
“made a conscious decision not to ask questions” about irregularities. Some faculty
members took the role of useful fools, vigorously defending the indefensible.
So the outlines of the mess came into focus. And the university dropped
pretense. Last fall, its lawyers acknowledged that, yes, we have deeply flawed classes,
but that is a matter for an accrediting organization. It is none of the N.C.A.A.’s
business. They argued that N.C.A.A. investigators had had their chance to unearth
this years ago. They muffed it, and so, tough luck.
“We’ve worked collaboratively with the N.C.A.A. enforcement staff,” said Bubba
Cunningham, the university’s director of athletics. “We have serious concerns about
the process.”
Cunningham is a man under much pressure. College sport, however, has its
rewards. Last autumn, the university gave him a $60,000 raise, bringing his salary
to $705,853.
Woven into the issue are questions of race, and class, and the grotesque
economics of bigtime college sports.
A few years back, Reginald Hildebrand, who is black and is a retired professor of
history who taught in the department of African and AfroAmerican studies, wrote a
searching essay. He pointed to evidence that, madeup classes aside, it was an
otherwise rigorous department.
He wrote of the fundamental conflict between the educational mission of a great
university and “running a successful professional minor league franchise” such as
Tar Heels basketball. A good coach, he noted, for a revenueproducing sport is paid
more than some entire departments. When athletics sets the priorities, one cannot
help but corrode the other.
Then there’s the question of athletes who arrive at this elite university with
often ragged academics.
“Everybody believes in affirmative action when it comes to the admission of
athletes,” Hildebrand wrote.
North Carolina has made a show of addressing this, hiring a legion of tutors and
note takers and building a 29,000squarefoot academic support center. This,
Hildebrand notes, is done so that the athletes can survive in the classroom while
never losing their focus on athletics, which is why they are at the university.
The athletes could be pulled into the mainstream of the university, he wrote, but
to do so would require many hours of extra study in those first semesters, and time
away from sport.
“It isn’t that coaches don’t really care about the welfare of the young men,”
Hildebrand noted. “It’s just that they have millions of dollars at stake.”
So we have a truth outburst. Few coaches of sound mind would think of echoing
it. In October 2014, reporters asked Williams about the N.C.A.A. investigation. He
sighed.
“It’s been a pain in the rear end,” he said. “I feel strongly, strongly, that we did
things the right way.”
He was strongly incorrect. Then again, he makes $2 million a year and got more
than $500,000 for making it to the Final Four. So what do I know?
The expired are more honest. Butch Davis was fired as football coach in 2011
during the investigation into the academics of his program.
The Wainstein report described his awakening when he arrived at Chapel Hill in
2006: “He quickly realized that there was lots of talk about the importance of
academics without anything to back up that talk. He found Chapel Hill’s attitude
toward student athlete academics to be like an Easter egg: Beautiful and impressive
to the outside world but without much life inside.”
