MaizeAndBlueWahoo

June 13th, 2013 at 4:30 PM ^

Quite possibly the most shameful thing the NCAA has done in the last five years is ignore the ridiculous shenanigans going on at UNC on the grounds that the "benefits" were available indiscriminately to the general population and not just athletes.  UNC should've been absolutely destroyed.  Now the NCAA has managed to send the message that you can fake every grade in the transcripts of every athlete on campus as long as you do the same for a couple nonathletes too.

clown question

June 13th, 2013 at 4:38 PM ^

Add the p.j. hairston mess (weed, driving a rental car not rented to him, with someone in the car dumping a gun) and it is going to be fun to follow UNC this offseason.

mGrowOld

June 13th, 2013 at 4:39 PM ^

I predict the NCAA is not going to take anymore of these shenanigans lying down. That this IT by God and they've had enough and they're not taking it anymore. That the book, the ban hammer and all sorts of mighty pestilence,hellfire and brimstone will be called down upon UNC this time.

So basically two non-revenue scholly reductions and an extra year of probation.

Maybe.

Jon06

June 13th, 2013 at 4:42 PM ^

SACS, their accrediting body, sent them an angry letter some months ago. They were supposed to be visited by SACS in April to account for themselves, and were scheduled for re-accreditation this month anyway. I don't see any information about either process online, although I assume neither process would be very transparent without a lot of media legwork.

LSAClassOf2000

June 13th, 2013 at 5:01 PM ^

I could be wrong here, but one of the undercards to this scandals was a glaring failure to monitor academics for quite some time as well.

I had thought that, at one point, they had more or less tried to pin this ultimately on the former director of academic support for athletes, who had failed to confirm that the numerous independent study courses were indeed creditworthy or held academic merit. If I am not mistaken, this was something that reportedly went back to the 1990s, with numerous lecture courses being somehow converted to independent study courses, several of which were heavily populated by athletes. 

 

snarling wolverine

June 13th, 2013 at 5:17 PM ^

Did it not occur to anyone at UNC that there might be something amiss about the notion of steering struggling students into a Swahili class in the first place?   Swahili is very difficult for English-speakers to learn; it has almost nothing in common with English.  If you're stashing away athletes there, that's a pretty gigantic red flag.

 

Cali Wolverine

June 13th, 2013 at 6:59 PM ^

...my roommate (UM wrestler) told me that the final exam was a pot luck. Rocks for Jocks was also a popular class for football and basketball players...and me. The basketball players NEVER went to class, but the football players attended on a regular basis...Even Heisman Trophy winners. I had the privilege of having Charles Woodson as my lab partner for a class...that was a good day.

MichiganManOf1961

June 14th, 2013 at 1:19 AM ^

Yup.  I knew if I was golden for an A by the first day of class if I saw enough Adidas gear in the room.  But, honestly, I can't say if the athletes were guided to the classes... they had first pick. So by the time I could finally get into the "Why Grandpa Went to War" type of classes, I was a senior, while they could take it from day 1.

MichiganManOf1961

June 14th, 2013 at 1:20 AM ^

Yup.  I knew if I was golden for an A by the first day of class if I saw enough Adidas gear in the room.  But, honestly, I can't say if the athletes were guided to the classes... they had first pick. So by the time I could finally get into the "Why Grandpa Went to War" type of classes, I was a senior, while they could take it from day 1.

Feat of Clay

June 14th, 2013 at 12:13 AM ^

It looks not-great but I suspect you'd find similar kinds of emails on other campuses, including (possibly) our own.



Say you're one of the academic success counselors in the AD. There's a class that other athletes have typically done well in. You don't know much about its content or rigor--partly because you don't want to know, but mostly because it's not your role to monitor pedagogy. Anyway, you wish it were available for a few athletes who want to get some credits over the summer.



You shoot the professor the email. This is part of your job--to help athletes find suitable classes. He wasn't planning to teach it this summer, but now he knows there is interest. He okays it with the dept and it gets added to the schedule. He lets you know since you'd asked. Your emails are friendly and familiar because you have worked together for years. Because the course was added late, few other students know its available so it ends up being exclusively for athletes.



You would have precisely the paper trail and circumstances being reported now. Everyone is just doing their job. It's possible that the faculty member is shirking his duties and coddling athletes but everyone at the University is pretty hands off on pedagogy and no one tells tenured faculty how to teach & grade.



I know there are other signs of trouble & academic fraud, but these emails aren't it.



MaizeAndBlueWahoo

June 14th, 2013 at 9:21 AM ^

Yes, until we place this in the proper context, which is to say, we know all about the history of this professor Nyangoro, who was (basically) fired for academic fraud.  And we know thanks to the Florida State case that "I didn't know what kind of classes my players were going to" doesn't fly.  Oh, and we also know for a fact that the players had a special tutor friend who wrote their papers for them.

So now the emails read something more like,

"Dear Professor Who I Know Schedules No-Show Classes On A Regular Basis,

It's me, your buddy from the athletic department.  Hey, I got some players who need credits to stay eligible.  Can you maybe hook us up with one of those classes where they don't have to actually go, and just write papers for?  They're really busy with football and all and they don't have time for real classes.  By the way, how did you like that guest coaching gig last season, that was a lot of fun, right?

Sincerely, Football Academic Eligibility Wrangler

Pretending these emails exist in a vacuum is the wrong way to go.  They walk like a duck and quack like a duck.

xxxxNateDaGreat

June 14th, 2013 at 12:54 AM ^

How hard is it to create a fake email account for this sort of thing? Seriously, NSA jokes aside, you'd think if these people were conspiring to commit some sort of fraud, they would create a dummy gmail or yahoo account instead of using their school emails...