HUGE Student-Athlete Academic Scandal at UNC

And Chancellor Folt said yesterday that those with knowledge or those who saw red flags should have done more to bring attention to the cheating. WTF?Mary Willingham was attacked by the administration and got demoted for speaking up.

Not Just Unresponsive wrote:

The Real Hero wrote:

The real hero in this UNC scandal is the whistleblower, Mary Willingham. Despite death threats from UNC supporters and an unresponsive administration, she stayed true to the mission of William Friday.

The UNC adminstration wasn't just unresponsive, they attacked Ms. Willingham as best they could with her having whistleblower status. They paid for an "independent review" to discredit her analysis. That review is what UNC supporters hung their collective hats on up until the Wainstein Report got released. Now, Tarheel Nation has changed its tune. "Everyone does it." "The coaches didn't know." "I hope they don't make us give back any of our championship banners." No one, except Ms. Willingham, looks good in this situation.

Hypocrisy ! I have yet to hear complaints about legacy preferences and

we all know why.

Do you all think GW Bush got into Yale because of his grades.The hypocrisy.

unfortunate wrote:

Academic Integrity as a whole can't ever be considered "The Most Nefarious Scandal" the NCAA has enforced. Especially when dealing with rape and murder scandals. It's just grades, it's a pretty victim less crime in comparison. It doesn't even compare to Baylor's basketball coach instructing his players to lie about a murder to cover up NCAA violations. I'll agree with you that from an Academic point of view it's worse than Penn St, but from an integrity point of view it's not even in the same ball park.

You'll also see a weak sentence handed down from the NCAA that punishes UNC without costing the NCAA any money. There really good at imposing infractions after the fact, (taking titles away) because if they were proactive they'd lose the revenue that Alabama generates in the post season. Or that Duke and UNC generate in March.

How close is UNC to NCAA death penalty?

What about forfeited championships (both national & conference)?

This was going on since 1991. NCAA investigators never took up this case?

How say u?

I went to UNC during the time that these AFAM paper classes were going on and I'm sick of hearing about how this devalues people's degrees.

I think people need to get off their high horse and accept that liberal arts education in general is a joke. The option to skate through 4 years of school and get a worthless degree is available to any student, not just student athletes. In fact, I bet most student athletes at UNC did more work than I did because they have to sit down with their tutors and go through everything.

Any class that I took that didn't take attendance I turned into a "no show" class. If I did go to class I likely slept through at least part of it. I consistently forfeited my 10% or whatever portion of the grade was class participation because I didn't want to discuss things with a bunch of self important liberal jerk offs.

I took 2 AFAM courses and they were indeed very easy, but I actually took a few from other departments (sociology, anthropology, history, etc.) that were easier. To get an A or B in any of these classes you basically just have to write some variation of how rich/white people suck and have screwed up the world.

In English/literature classes I read cliff notes instead of the books. In one class I went the whole semester without the textbook and had to go flip through it for a couple hours in the book store before the final. Once I missed a mid-term exam because I skipped class so much I didn't even know when it was. I was allowed to make it up for no penalty and got an A in the course. I could go on and on but the bottom line is that I was a huge slacker and still graduated with a double major and a GPA over 3.0

I'm not surprised one bit that the AFAM department had joke classes. If you read the report you will see that Crowder set up these classes because she sympathized with students who struggled in school like she did. How did somebody like her get the position she did? I don't know. Regardless, the athlete's academic advisors did what any normal person would do when they encounter a situation like this; they exploited it. I doubt the coaches were ever told explicitly what was going on so that they could maintain deniability.

This scandal is just a bunch of ivory tower academics faking outrage at the fact that their esteemed liberal arts curriculum is actually a bunch of BS. I don't give 2 cents about the university or the value of my degree but I sure did enjoy my 4 years there and I will continue to cheer for the sports teams because that is what I have done my whole life.

Let's start at the beginning. While the problems with the AFAM dept at UNC have been reported on for several years, the scope of the academic scandal at UNC, specifically the length of time it had been going on and the number of students and staff involved, of which the AFAM dept problems were just a part, has not been public knowledge for several years. That is why this is news, to the chagrin of UNC apologists everywhere.

And no one except a UNC apologist would assert that UNC has done everything in its power to air its own dirty laundry regarding the scope of the scandal. UNC tried to air just enough to keep everyone satisfied that it was doing everything in its power to get to the bottom of the scandal. The reality was and is that UNC at its highest levels, both on the academic side and the athletic side, had to have known the true scope of the scandal for years. That, or the administration, deans and head coaches at UNC are the dumbest group of folks ever assembled at a prestigious D1 institution.

Yes, UNC commissioned the Wainstein report, but the report itself appears to be an attempt to throw more lower-level people under the bus while still protecting the people who had the most to gain from the rampant academic fraud, the revered coaches and highly-paid administrators. Good "independent investigators" uncover just what the principal wants them to uncover, nothing more. Based on my review of his report, Wainstein is a good "independent investigator."

Your description of Willingham's research is proof that you bought UNC's narrative lock, stock and barrel. She is not a fraud. Her research was not falsified. And, the problem she uncovered dove-tailed quite nicely into the AFAM dept problems, which foreshadowed the broader academic scandal. Rather than acknowledge those facts, UNC went into self-protection mode in the hopes that its longstanding academic fraud would go undiscovered.

I have no doubt that other universities and colleges have done and are continuing to do the same or similar things in terms of academic fraud. The prime suspects are everywhere. Just pick any school where sports is all-important. FSU, OSU, USC, LSU. I would love to see some former players at these universities come forward and detail exactly what they were required to do academically at these schools.

The Real Hero wrote:

And Chancellor Folt said yesterday that those with knowledge or those who saw red flags should have done more to bring attention to the cheating.

WTF?Mary Willingham was attacked by the administration and got demoted for speaking up.

Screw Chancellor Folt. Folt should be fired and publicly shamed. This makes me so mad.

In other words, you are a coward and have no integrity.

Not unique wrote:

Because:

A) It would be career suicide.

B) The whistle blowers always take the hardest fall.

Audit some of the transcripts at your own university. See how many athletes have (leadership development) courses or similar titles that somehow count toward degree credit for most majors but are only prevalent on athletic transcripts.

Shameful wrote:

Why don't you come forward?

It's people like you who let things like this continue. Shame on you.

I really think you are just blowing smoke though.

I agree with you although I believe the UNC should be SEVERELY punished.The unc professor should be fired but so should many including of course Williams. The NCAA purposely chose to be blind to this. For some reason I find the hypocrisy of "higher education" in this matter particularly appalling.

So legacy athletes or legacy students are dragging down UNC? Interesting take, anything to deflect off of the idiot football and basketball players.

I'm not really blaming them as they should be in the minors playing in tier two cities. Not at an academic institution taking spots from real student athletes.

I'm with you all the way.

Perhaps UNC needs to up its academic standards for all students. One of my friends attended Duke for one year. She had the typical Duke pedigree - almost perfect SAT scores and grades. While at Duke, she spent countless hours studying but received A's, B's, and C's. Following her freshman year, she transferred to UNC. (Her coach took another position and she wasn't happy with her replacement).

At UNC, in three years,she got straight A's and said she had worked 2-3 times harder at Duke for A's, B's, and C's. She had assumed UNC would be similar to Duke academically, but it wasn't even in the same ballpark.

To not be concerned about the value of your degree is just stunning. Sad you will continue to support a school just because you have done it your whole life.

You think GW got into Yale because of his grades ? How many silver spoon fed

'students' are in colleges solely on their parents' generous 'gifts' to the colleges.

No your right but still had to be able to read and write. By your vile standards this discourse is tame. Are you on mood stabilizers?

Please ban lpd! wrote:

No your right but still had to be able to read and write. By your vile standards this discourse is tame. Are you on mood stabilizers?

Your grammar sux.

Gosh. Nothing about your post would ever make someone think a UNC degree should be devalued, eh?

You must be very proud of yourself.

Thank you! Can I still submit my paper on Lets Runs' idiots that post non sequitur comments. I know my paper could make the Colorado State student paper if I was an all conference football player.

As an athlete at a major academic institution, I can confirm that this takes place regularly. Normally it's open to all students you just need to know what class to sign up for.