On
January 14, 2014, a segment ran on the ESPN show “Outside the Lines” discussing
the latest scandal revelations at the University of North Carolina. Mary Willingham was featured, as well as
other specialists in the fields of college athletics and the media. Bob Ley, the no-nonsense reporter who is not
afraid to tackle tough issues, was the show’s moderator.
He gave a quick recap at the show’s
start: “The current issue is (a) study
of reading levels which paints an abysmal picture of incoming athletes. Mary Willingham did that study as a graduate
student, working as a learning specialist with UNC athletes.” Ley then went on to recount some of the earlier words
of Willingham: “(In) This July email to
several professors, she says, ‘I’ve reviewed academic data for 183 athletes
admitted to UNC between 2004 and 2012.
About 160 athletes are admitted each year. Although several teams are represented in
this group, the great majority of the students, 85 percent, come from the
revenue sports, men’s football and basketball.
These numbers speak to the presence at UNC of a significant population
of athletes unprepared for the rigors of university classrooms. 60 percent of these students have reading
scores below the 50 percent range… Unless we offer intensive reading instruction
and a course of curriculum for our profit sport athletes, academic fraud will
continue.”
Willingham plainly said what she
felt (and what numerous other data sets dating back to the mid-1990's had strongly suggested)
had been occurring for years at UNC:
academic fraud.
ESPN’s Andy Katz had spoken with
head basketball coach Roy Williams the day before the airing of the show. When asked why Williams did not plan on
meeting with Willingham to discuss the claims that one of his former players
was illiterate, Williams had this to say in terms of his rationale: “Because I don’t think that’s my job… I should be the one to try to determine
whether we should play zone or man to man.
I should not be the one to determine whether or not information in an
academic area is appropriate or inappropriate.”
Williams would go on to selectively
choose certain statistics from the past in order to paint a rosier situation
than actually existed at the university.
“We’ve only had one senior that didn’t graduate,” he said. “They don’t give those degrees away. I mean, I went to school here. They don’t give those degrees away.” Not mentioned at all was the
documented data of years of fraudulent courses in the Department of African and
Afro-American Studies, a major that multiple past UNC basketball players had
chosen. Only one senior had not
graduated, according to Williams. But
how many of those other graduating seniors had taken fraudulent and/or
nonexistent classes to bolster their GPA’s and eligibility? Much more on that topic will be discussed in the coming months.
Later in the “Outside the Lines”
show Bob Ley spoke directly with Mary Willingham. At one pointed Ley asked her if she felt her
employment was endangered by speaking out, to which Willingham replied: “Well, I think my employment has been in
danger since I began speaking out last year.
… I was demoted, my title was stripped, and lots has happened.”
Ley then directly brought up the
topic of the AFAM department and whether there had been any willing
participation of academic fraud on the school’s part: “I want to ask you, in your time working
closely with the athletes during those seven years, did you see any evidence of
these players being involved in these so-called “no-show” classes out of the
Afro-American and African Studies department?
… Did you see people in the
athletics area moving kids and guys and women towards those programs, directing
them there?”
Willingham’s response: “Yes, we directed them to paper classes. I’ve said that before. We as academic advisers directed athletes to
these paper classes, and we knew they existed.
I believe that the administration knew they existed.”
One of the guests on the show that
day was David Ridpath, the president-elect of the Drake Group, which advocates
reforms in athletics. Ley said to
Ridpath: “What you just heard and what
you know about this Carolina situation, which has been around for a number of
years. What’s your take on where we
stand on it right now?”
Ridpath’s response did not mince
words: “I think the issue that we have
from an academic perspective is that we want academic integrity and the chance
for everyone to have a shot at a real education, not a manufactured education
just to maintain eligibility. That’s the
core issue.”
Next, Ridpath would touch on a
troubling matter than had arisen over the prior few years, and which will be
given more attention in the months to come: the NCAA. Ridpath said:
“Beyond that, we have a serious problem with the NCAA looking away when
they have punished others for much less academic fraud, and much less of a
direct involvement, or indirect involvement, if you will, from the athletic
department. … It’s shameful that Mark
Emmert, (and) the new director of enforcement John Duncan, that they have not
taken action to investigate the academic fraud at North Carolina and have
accepted what I would argue with Mary on the whitewashed reports of North
Carolina as gospel, and basically saying no NCAA violations have been
committed. I was part of academic fraud
cases where it was determined by the NCAA there was academic fraud for much,
much less.”
The “whitewashed reports” to which
Ridpath referred covered several university-sanctioned (and possibly controlled) reviews
over the past few years – reviews that will be given much more attention and
scrutiny in the future.
The following day, January 15, 2014,
an article appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer that gave further credence
to some of the information that Willingham had shared with Bob Ley. In an article penned by investigative reporter
Dan Kane, former UNC football player Michael McAdoo concurred that players were
placed into certain classes by the school’s academic advisers. McAdoo had earlier been kicked off of the
football team in 2010 due to issues with one of those fraudulent courses, AFAM
280: Blacks in North Carolina.
“They pretty much put me in that
class,” McAdoo said of the counselors in the Academic Support Program for
Student-Athletes. He said he was put in
his first no-show class the spring semester of his freshman year, according to
the article. He said counselors told
him, “it’s pretty much a class that you take just to get your GPA up.” McAdoo said he and other athletes were happy to have the classes. There
was no class time, and the papers could be completed at semester’s end. “I didn’t think twice about it,” he
said. “I was young and they was like, ‘You
could get a quick three (credit) hours.’ “
He said he never received anything less than an A-minus in the classes
until one of his papers was found to have received impermissible assistance
from a university tutor. Like many other
issues, that too will be discussed in further detail in the future.
In closing, McAdoo had this to
say: “I felt like I was done wrong. The university didn’t stand up; they didn’t
have my back. They said academics is the
first thing they were going to push – ‘You are going to do academics and then
play sports.’ But come to find out it
just felt like it was all a scam.”
A day later on January 16, 2014, CNN
gave a brief update saying that UNC would investigate Willingham’s claims over
athletes’ reading abilities. Some of the
information coming from the school was disturbing, however – not only in their
continued treatment of Willingham, but also in the selective nature of how they
chose to present data.
UNC officials had talked with
Willingham several days earlier in what they had described as a “cordial”
meeting. Willingham, however, described
it as being “condescending”. The school
had continued to dispute her findings, and her university approval to do the
research had also been pulled by UNC.
Other quotes in the CNN article
showed that when trying to dispute some of the points Willingham had made, the
school chose a very narrow window of data.
University officials “pointed out that in 2013, no student-athletes were
admitted with scores below the threshold, and in 2012, only two
student-athletes in the revenue sports were admitted with scores that low.” The problem with that weak informational offering was that
Willingham’s research had covered the years 2004-2012. So not only was the university referencing one year (2013) that had not even been a part of the original research, but they
were also ignoring eight other years that Willingham had covered.
The practice of cherry-picking data
and not presenting the entire scope of a story was nothing new to the school,
its administrative leaders, and presumably a host of Public Relations firms
that had been on contract over the past several years. Once again, that is yet another
topic which will receive scrutiny in the future. A major announcement on that front is now no
more than two months away.
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