U.N.C. Investigation Reveals Athletes Took Fake Classes

[theworldismine13]

U.N.C. Investigation Reveals Athletes Took Fake Classes

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/s...8288F7AA067FDD5CF34&gwt=pay&assetType=nyt_now

It was November 2009, and alarm was spreading among the academic counselors charged with bolstering the grades of football players at the University of North Carolina. For years the players and others had been receiving A’s and B’s in nonexistent classes in the African studies department, but the administrator who had set up the fake classes had just retired, taking all those easy grades with her.
The counselors convened a meeting of the university’s football coaches, using a PowerPoint presentation to drive home the notion that the classes “had played a large role in keeping underprepared and/or unmotivated players eligible to play,” according to a report released by the university on Wednesday.

“We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which ... they didn’t go to class ... they didn’t have to take notes, have to stay awake ... they didn’t have to meet with professors ... they didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material,” a slide in the presentation said. “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!”

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Julius Nyang’oro was the professor of record for many of the fake classes. Credit Harry Lynch/The News & Observer
Wednesday’s report, prepared by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former general counsel at the F.B.I. and now a partner at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, found that between 1993 and 2011, two employees in the university’s African and Afro-American studies department presided over what was essentially a “shadow curriculum” designed to help struggling students — many of them Tar Heels athletes — stay afloat.

It is the latest in a series of investigations into the scandal, which first came to public attention three years ago. The revelations have cast a decidedly unflattering light on the university, which has long boasted of its ability to maintain high academic standards while running a top-flight sports program. Until now, the university has emphasized that the scandal was purely academic. On Wednesday, it acknowledged for the first time that it was also athletic, with members of sports teams being steered into and benefiting disproportionately from the fraudulent classes.

The N.C.A.A., which initially said that the scandal had nothing to do with the sports program, has reopened an investigation into the matter.

The university’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, has said that U.N.C. has already established myriad policies to prevent a recurrence, including setting up spot checks to ensure that classes are in fact taking place. She said that as a result of the report, four employees — including one working at another campus in the North Carolina system — had been “terminated,” and that the university had begun disciplinary proceedings against five others.

Although the report found no evidence that high-level university officials knew about the fake classes, it faulted the university for missing numerous warning signs over many years.

More than 3,100 students, 47.6 percent of them athletes, were enrolled in and received credit for the phantom classes, most of which were created and graded solely by a single employee, Deborah Crowder. Ms. Crowder was a nonacademic who worked as the African studies department’s administrator and who told Mr. Wainstein that she had been motivated by a desire to help struggling athletes.

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Some of the classes took the form of independent study courses in which the students never met the professor; others were lecture courses in which the classes were supposed to meet at specific times and places but never did. Over time, Ms. Crowder was joined in the scheme by the chairman of the department, Julius Nyang’oro, who became the professor of record for many of the fake classes. Mr. Nyang’oro retired in 2012, after news of the scheme came to light.

Ms. Crowder required students to turn in only a single paper, but the papers were often largely plagiarized or padded with “fluff,” the report said. She generally gave the papers A’s or B’s after a cursory glance. The classes were widely known on campus as “paper classes.”

The report listed myriad examples of the outrageousness of the scheme, which Mr. Nyang’oro continued even after Ms. Crowder’s retirement, offering six additional bogus courses.

Sometimes, the report said, counselors in the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes explicitly told Mr. Nyang’oro and Ms. Crowder what grades students needed “to remain academically or athletically eligible.”

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An email from the academic counselor for the women’s basketball team to the administrator of the African studies department, who set up and ran the nonexistent classes.
After skimming a student’s paper, Mr. Nyang’oro “would then assign grades based largely on his assessment of the impact that grade would have on the student’s ability to remain eligible,” the report said.

In the case of Ms. Crowder, the report said she sometimes negotiated with academic support counselors over individual students’ grades. For example, in September 2008, Jan Boxill, the academic counselor for the women’s basketball team, sent Ms. Crowder a paper to be graded. After promising in an email that “I will try to accommodate as many favors as possible,” Ms. Crowder then expressed some skepticism about the paper.

“Did you say a D will do?” she asked, according to emails released by the university. “I’m only asking because 1, no sources, 2, it has absolutely nothing to do with the assignments for that class and 3. it seems to me to be a recycled paper.”

Ms. Boxill responded, “Yes, a D will be fine; that’s all she needs.”

According to U.N.C.’s website, Ms. Boxill is currently the director of the university’s Parr Center for Ethics and was recently named the 2015 Warren Fraleigh distinguished scholar by the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport. A spokeswoman for the Parr Center said Ms. Boxill was traveling and could not immediately be reached for comment.

The university’s football coach in 2009, Butch Davis, is quoted by Mr. Wainstein as saying that he did not recall seeing the PowerPoint slide outlining the benefits of the fake courses.

The papers the students turned in were often woefully bad, according to the report, which asked three outside experts to examine 150 such papers. The review found that in 61, at least 25 percent of the text “was taken verbatim from other sources,” and in 26 of those, at least 50 percent was copied from somewhere else.


“For example, in one paper that was ostensibly about the life and work of Nikki Giovanni as it related to larger dynamics in African-American culture, the student had simply written a two-page introduction and a last page of text,” the experts found, according to the report.

“The entire rest of the paper in between those pages is almost nothing other than transcriptions of poems and other texts by Giovanni, formatted to take up maximal space,” the report also said.

One thing was made abundantly clear in the report: The fake classes went a long way toward helping athletes remain eligible to play on the Tar Heels teams.

“In the case of 329 students, the grade they received in a paper class provided the G.P.A. boost that either kept or pushed their G.P.A. above the 2.0 level for a semester,” the report said. Of those students, 169 were athletes: 123 football players, 15 men’s basketball players, eight women’s basketball players and 26 athletes from other sports.

In the fall of 2009, the first semester in more than a decade without Ms. Crowder’s paper classes, the football team had its lowest grade-point average in 10 years, 2.121, the report said.

 

[Domingo Halliburton]

butch Davis had the Cleveland browns in the.playoffs and turned North Carolina into a good football team while he was there, I dont care how much cheating was going on..hes a hell of a coach

 

[Blackking]

in the African studies department

 

[wheywhey]

I had been under the impression that only athletes were involved and that the NCAA didn't want to get involved because they knew that nearly every major sports program in the country was doing something similar. I'm surprised to see that only 47.6% of the students were athletes.

Athletes aside, less "marketable" majors like African Studies have to provide easy A's or no one would take the classes and the department would get closed down. Princeton has a strict grading policy that limits A's but the Department of Slavic Languages ignores the policy and hands out as many A's as they want.

 

[theworldismine13]

The Price of Eligibility at U.N.C.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...cial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook

“College sports are special,” the N.C.A.A. president Mark Emmert writes in a letter on his organization’s Web site. “Many of us live for those crisp autumn Saturday afternoons or the excitement of an overtime tipoff. But the true value of college sports, the reason we as an Association do what we do, goes far beyond the games we love. It lies in our ability to provide educational opportunities that transform the lives of young people.”

This is how the N.C.A.A. defines the basic transaction of the amateur model of college sports: student athletes help to generate billions of dollars in revenue for other people in exchange for the “educational opportunities” that they receive and take with them for the rest of their lives. This system has been widely criticized, but, in order for it to make even the most basic kind of sense, the education offered has to have actual value—it has to be, at the very least, real.

By this measure, the results of an investigation of academic fraud within the African and Afro-American Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are especially damning. The report, released on Wednesday, found that, for many of the school’s student athletes, during a span that lasted nearly two decades, part of their education was essentially worthless.


Between 1993 and 2011, when irregularities within the department came to light as part of plagiarism allegations against the football player Michael McAdoo, who was enrolled in a high-level Swahili course, more than three thousand students were enrolled in what the report describes as a “shadow curriculum.” The system was overseen by Julius Nyang’oro, a professor and the department chair, and operated by Deborah Crowder, who was employed primarily as a secretary within the African and Afro-American Studies program. Crowder, though not a member of the university faculty, coördinated a series of so-called paper classes, which were classified as independent-study courses. As the report puts it:

These were classes that involved no interaction with a faculty member, required no class attendance or course work other than a single paper, and resulted in consistently high grades that Crowder awarded without reading the papers or otherwise evaluating their true quality.

The existence and nature of these nominal courses has been known since 2011, and the department has been the subject of a series of investigations ordered by the university, as well as one conducted by the N.C.A.A. Yet, this new report, the result of another independent investigation commissioned by the university, is the most comprehensive account so far, and, for the first time, includes interviews with Nyang’oro and Crowder. It has produced several new and startling revelations, including the fact that the fake classes were especially popular among student athletes, who accounted for nearly half of the documented enrollees despite making up just four per cent of the university’s student population. Among non-athletes, the courses were favored by fraternity members, to the point where Crowder expressed worry in an e-mail that word had gotten out on the “frat circuit.” (The report notes that some students were genuinely interested in the subject of the courses and took them seriously, even as the people administering them did not.)

In addition, the report states that several counselors within the Office of Academic Support Program for Student Athletes not only had direct knowledge of the shadow curriculum but also, in some cases, steered students toward these courses in order to help them secure academic eligibility. These counselors worked with students participating in football, men’s and women’s basketball, and women’s soccer, as well as students competing in Olympic level sports. The investigation found that some coaches, including the former football coach Butch Davis, had been told about the specifics of the classes, while others, including the current head basketball coach Roy Williams, were aware that an unusually high number of their players were enrolled in the program but did not know the specifics. (In June, Rashad McCants, one of Williams’s former players, told ESPN that Williams had known about the scheme; Williams has denied it, and the report found no evidence to corroborate McCants’s allegation.)

Some athletic counselors even went as far as to coördinate with Crowder on what grade a student would need to maintain a minimum G.P.A. The report includes an e-mail exchange between Crowder and Jan Boxill, a counselor for the women’s basketball team, in which Boxill forwarded a paper from one of her players. Crowder responded: “Did you say a D will do for [the basketball player]? I’m only asking because 1. no sources, 2, it has absolutely nothing to do with the assignments for that class and 3. it seems to me to be a recycled paper. She took [another class] in spring of 2007 and that was likely for that class.” Both admitted to colluding on the grade, and the student went on to graduate—another success story for the N.C.A.A.

News of Crowder’s retirement, in 2009, was greeted with outright fear by the counselors charged with keeping student athletes academically eligible. The report documents a meeting that year between two counselors and the head coaching staff of the football team, during which the counselors showed a PowerPoint slide that explained how the courses had worked for players in the past: “They didn’t go to class. They didn’t take notes, have to stay awake. They didn’t have to meet with professors. They didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material.” The slide ends with these words of warning, in bold: “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!” Nyang’oro, the department chair, was pushed to continue a few of the paper classes until 2011.

One of the key questions that the investigation attempted to answer is why Nyang’oro and Crowder would have perpetrated this fraud in the first place. The investigation found no evidence of pressure or influence from the athletic department or the university. Instead, according to the report, the motivation for the two was personal, and was mostly an odd expression of compassion. Crowder, who graduated from the university in the seventies, recalled feeling particularly unsupported while she was a student there and, perhaps as a result, is described as someone who would adopt students as special causes. She was a big fan of the school’s sports teams, and “cared so much about the fortunes of the basketball team that she was occasionally unable to come to work for a day or two after the Tar Heels lost a basketball game.” Nyang’oro, too, is described as feeling sympathy for student athletes who were struggling to keep up academically. He recalled being particularly upset about the stories of two former students of his who had been forced to leave school—one ended up murdered, the other in jail. “When he learned about their fates,” the report says, “Nyang’oro committed himself to preventing such tragedies in the future and to helping other struggling student-athletes to stay in school.”

The report does not excuse the people involved, but it does place their behavior within the context of a wider narrative, one that exists at schools across the United States. “Academically elite universities like Chapel Hill often feel a tension between their high academic standards and the effort to build a strong athletic program,” the report states. It continues:

It is this tension … that partly explains how the academic irregularities came to be at Chapel Hill. At some point in 1993, Crowder took it upon herself to relieve this tension by offering classes with watered-down academic requirements that made it easier for struggling student-athletes to get a passing grade. Nyang’oro signed on to this scheme soon thereafter, and these classes quickly became popular among Chapel Hill athletes. By the mid-2000’s, these classes had become a primary–if not the primary–way that struggling athletes kept themselves from having eligibility problems.

Maintaining eligibility is not the same thing as receiving an education—and graduation rates padded by guiding students toward the paths of least resistance is another example of the seemingly well-intentioned paternalism and harmful low expectations that pervade so much of college sports. The student athletes who accepted false grades for little work might have figured that they were getting away with something, but they were also being wronged. “I apologize first to the students who entrusted us with their education and took these courses,” the school’s chancellor, Carol Folt, said, on Wednesday. “You deserved so much better from your University, and we will do everything we can to make it right.” One lesson from the U.N.C. scandal is that college athletes need less compassion and more respect.​