4runner wrote:
I went to UNC wrote:UNC rivals really just want Roy Williams gone and the Wainstein report doesn't even come close to implicating him.
I think most UNC rivals would rather see Dean Smith thrown under the bus. ;^)
In all honesty though, Dean was a ba____rd and it would not surprise me at all if this culture originated with him.
Unlike some fans I don't worship Dean or Roy. They are just basketball coaches and they are human. This culture most certainly did not originate with Dean Smith though. It originated with a bad hire in the AFAM department.
This is straight from the report:
"Despite her love for the University, she often told people that she had a difficult experience during her student years at Chapel Hill, feeling that she was left adrift by a faculty and staff that focused on “the best and the brightest” and failed to pay attention to students like herself who needed direction and support. Because of that experience, Crowder felt a strong affinity for students with academic or other challenges in their lives. She believed it was her duty to lend a helping hand to struggling students, and in particular to that subset of student-athletes who came to campus without adequate academic preparation for Chapel Hill’s demanding curriculum."
The situation in the AFAM department was created by Crowder. The word on easy classes travels fast and it didn't take long for the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes to start exploiting the situation. It is not the athletic department's job to determine whether or not a class is up to par, that is up to the Deans and the Chancellor.
In the report you can see that the higher up Deans let the AFAM department run autonomously for the entire period in question with no meaningful reviews. Some academic advisors for the general student body caught on that something was fishy in the AFAM department but the info either never made it to the higher ups or was ignored. This doesn't surprise me one bit, because knowing the environment around Chapel Hill, anyone questioning the legitimacy of AFAM's curriculum would likely have been shamed as a racist.