Chapter
Fourteen
Mary Willingham;
AFAM independent studies;
The Faculty
Committee on Athletics
The previous chapter ended with UNC history professor Jay
Smith once again speaking out against some of the reported actions of the
university, and the apparent lack of concern school officials displayed towards
the indiscretions that continued to damage its reputation. As had been the case for almost the entire
multi-year scandal, Smith was virtually the only UNC staff member who had been
vocal about his displeasure regarding the events that had transpired. Considering the university had an academic
staff numbering well over 3,000, and that a large part of the school’s mantra
was that it did things “the Carolina way,” the fact that he stood alone was
rather astounding. Why had so many
others remained quiet? Was it because
they possibly feared for their jobs should they speak out against the
university and its athletics program?
Did they perhaps not care about the school’s (and their own) academic
reputation? Or did some of them actually
value the national title banners that hung from the rafters of the Dean Smith
Center as much as the casual, everyday fans of the school did? As 2012 drew near an end, though, a separate
voice of displeasure finally stepped forward to join Smith and admonish the
past academic indiscretions.
*
* *
Mary Willingham was a reading specialist at UNC. She graduated from Loyola University in 1994
with a BS in Psychology, and then completed the LD Certification Program at UNC
in 2003. She began working at the school
in October of that same year as a tutor in the Academic Center for Student
Athletes. In January of 2010 she
transferred to the school’s College of Arts & Sciences and became an
Assistant Director for the Center for Student Success and Academic Counseling. According to the university’s website, the
Center was “dedicated to promoting
academic excellence to assist students in achieving their academic goals while
enrolled at Carolina.”
Willingham came forward
with an exclusive media interview by way of a November 17, 2012, article in the
Raleigh News and Observer. Being the first person from inside the
academic support program to go public with details about its operation,
Willingham told the newspaper that many past UNC athletes had stayed eligible
to play sports because the academic support system had provided improper help
and tolerated plagiarism. Even worse,
when she raised questions or made objections to the cheating she saw, she said
that no one at the university took her concerns seriously – much like teacher J. Nikol
Beckham and the Erik Highsmith case from the previous chapter.
In the article that was
a front-page feature, Willingham said she lodged complaints at least two years
before UNC’s academic problems erupted into a full blown scandal. She would eventually focus some of her
thoughts on the matter into a thesis for her master’s degree, which was based
on the corrupting influence of big-money sports on university academics. Willingham kept her complaints in-house for a
while, but a recent event had been the last straw for her. After attending the funeral of former UNC
System President Bill Friday, a huge supporter of Carolina yet also a prominent
critic of revenue-driven college sports, Willingham saw that no one within the
university was willing to admit that they had been aware of an athletic/academic
problem. It was then that she decided to
go public via a series of interviews with the News and Observer.
Willingham clearly
stated that there were numerous people in the academic support program who knew
that what was going on was wrong, but they looked the other way, helping to
protect one of the nation’s most successful (and previously respected) athletic
programs. She said that no-show
classes had been offered by the chairman of the AFAM department at least as far
back as 2003, when she had begun working for the support program. Despite being billed as lecture classes, they
were commonly known within the program as “paper classes.” However, those classes never met. Willingham learned of the irregular courses
when she had been asked to work with an athlete on a paper. She said it was a “cut-and-paste” job, but
when she raised questions about it, staff members told her not to worry. The student later received a grade of B or
better. Ever since the uncovering of
Julius Peppers’ transcript there had been strong suspicions that the problems
within the AFAM department had spanned further back than 2007. Through Willingham, confirmation of that
hypothesis from someone with direct university knowledge was finally provided.
Willingham also stated
that members of the men’s basketball team took no-show classes until the fall
semester of 2009, at which time the team had been assigned a new academic
counselor. It was discussed in a previous
chapter that Wayne Walden, the long-time academic advisor for basketball coach
Roy Williams at both Kansas and UNC, had left the program in mid-2009. Willingham said the new counselor was
“appalled” to learn of the fraudulent classes, and wanted no part of them. Willingham declined to name the new
counselor, but university records showed that Jennifer Townsend was hired as an
associate director in August 2009 and took over the role that Walden had
vacated for the men’s basketball program.
According to the newspaper article, the new counselor (Townsend) told
Willingham that she would not enroll the players in the no-show classes,
stating, “I didn’t come here… to do this.
Everything has to be on the up and up.”
Townsend’s past work
history had indirect connections with prior NCAA violations, so it was likely
that she knew fraudulent classes and actions when she saw them. Her profile on UNC’s website showed she was
formerly the academic counselor for men’s and women’s basketball at the
University of Minnesota. She worked
there after the school went through one of the most notable scandals in college
basketball history, the N&O
said. In 1999, the St. Paul Pioneer Press uncovered a cheating
scandal involving a former university office manager who had written papers,
filled out take-home exams and done other course work for 20 basketball players
over a five-year period. The NCAA
responded with numerous sanctions for the school, and perhaps more importantly
erased a 1997 Final Four appearance from the record books. In comparison, the events at Minnesota at the
very least appeared to be on par with some of what had happened at UNC. At the worst, the events at Minnesota paled
in scope with UNC’s infractions, as the events at Minnesota covered a shorter
stretch of time and dealt with far less affected athletes. However, the NCAA had still not revisited UNC
to reopen an investigation – one which could potentially cause the erasure of
not only Final Four appearances from the record books, but also multiple National
Championships won by the school’s basketball team. Jennifer Townsend, the former Minnesota
employee and then-current academic advisor for Roy Williams’ program, did not
return messages left by the newspaper.
* * *
Willingham made other
assertions in her interviews with the News
and Observer. She stated that some
of the athletes she had worked with told her they had never read a book or
written a paragraph, but were placed in no-show classes where the only required
assignment was a 20-page paper – and yet they came away with grades of B or
better. Willingham did say that most of
the athletes in the nonrevenue sports were capable of doing college-level
work. However, the lowered academic
standards for football players and men’s basketball players – known as “special
admits” – brought in athletes who lacked the academic ability, while still
being expected to devote multiple hours a week to their sports. She said that was a dynamic destined to
produce cheating. The special admissions
for football and basketball players went back at least as far as the early
1990’s, according to the article. An
earlier chapter noted that UNC had refused to release data on the number of
special admits its basketball program had allowed. “There are serious literacy deficits and they
cannot do the course work here,” Willingham said. “And if you cannot do the course work here,
how do you stay eligible? You stay
eligible by some department, some professor, somebody who gives you a break. Here it happened with paper classes. There’s no question.”
Other information she
told the N&O was that roughly
five years ago, Bobbi Owen, the senior associate dean who had oversight of the
Academic Support Program, tried to get control over the number of independent
study classes offered by the AFAM department.
At the time they had averaged nearly 200 such classes a year. Independent studies required no class time
and often not much more than a term paper.
Past data showed that they were immensely popular with basketball and
football players. The transcript of
Julius Peppers, for example, showed that he had taken four such courses, and
former star basketball player Sean May had also mentioned taking courses where
he didn’t actually have to be in attendance.
* * *
According to the
November News and Observer article,
in October of 2012 Mary Willingham had started a blog called “Athletics vs.
Academics, a Clash of Cultures.” Former
Governor Jim Martin and a representative of the accounting firm Baker Tilley
interviewed her a few days later. Martin
declined to talk about what she said, but he was no longer standing by what he
had stated prior to her interview: that no one in the program had seen a
problem with the no-show classes.
Instead, his new stance was that he couldn’t comment.
When questioned about
Willingham’s assertions, Chancellor Holden Thorp declined to discuss them. He said, “I’m not going to talk to you about
this stuff because we’ve got this thing going on with Governor Martin, and
that’s where our focus is right now, and these are the kinds of matters we’re
working on. That’s all I’ve got to say
about it right now.” Calls and emails
from the newspaper to other university officials, former and current Academic
Support Program staff and others to address Willingham’s claims were either not
returned, drew no comment, or no response.
As pointed out earlier,
Steve Kirschner, an athletics department spokesman, had said in prior email
messages that the last basketball player to major in African and Afro-American
Studies graduated in 2009. He said
interest had declined in the department’s majors after 2005, and chalked it up
to “different players have different interests.” However, what he failed to
mention was that 2009 was also the year that men’s basketball academic advisor
Wayne Walden also left the program. And
as Willingham asserted, that was the year that the new counselor (Jennifer
Townsend) refused to take part in the AFAM no-show classes that had long
littered the schedules of UNC’s basketball players. UNC officials continued to claim that
coincidence was the root of many of their athletic/academic problems, but the
data and details continued to strongly suggest otherwise.
* * *
After her early negative
experience with an athlete’s paper, Willingham told the News and Observer that she avoided papers from the African Studies
department by spending most of her time working with athletes in the nonrevenue
sports. The issue of plagiarism arose
again, however, when she was asked to look at a history paper for a football
player. She said it, too, did not look
like the student had written it.
Willingham believed the athlete’s tutor had done the work, and she told
the program director about the issue.
The program director was Robert Mercer, and the tutor was Jennifer
Wiley. Mercer would eventually refer
Willingham to another academic counselor, who denied a problem and took no
action, Willingham said.
After that frustrating
episode of non-action, Willingham told the newspaper that she began seeking
jobs outside of the academic support program.
It was in early 2010 that she began working for another learning center
at UNC that served non-athletes. Two
years later, the NCAA would find that Wiley had written parts of papers for
three football players. One of those athletes,
Willingham said, was the same player she had previously reported. Jennifer Wiley had long refused to comment on
any news articles, and Robert Mercer – who had been moved out of the academic
support program earlier in the year – could not be reached for comment, either.
Willingham said she met
with UNC attorneys at their request in mid-2010. That was during the NCAA investigation, and
the meeting was to discuss what had happened in 2008. Afterwards she said they thanked her for
coming, but never talked to her again.
Furthermore, Willingham said she never heard from the NCAA at all during
the entire time the Association was on campus looking into the
athletic/academic scandal. It was
unknown whether the NCAA had even been made aware of Willingham and her
claims. Since that knowledge would
likely have been relayed to the NCAA via university officials, there was
significant doubt of it conveyance.
The bombshell November
17, 2012, N&O article closed by
saying that for the most part Willingham did not blame the athletes. She conceded that some were uncooperative and
troublesome, but many wanted to succeed on the field and in the classroom. “It’s not right,” she said. “It’s the adults who are not doing what they
are supposed to do.”
* * *
An article appeared in USA Today a few days later on November
20, 2012. It covered some of the fallout
from Willingham’s claims about the depth of UNC’s past knowledge regarding its
own athletic/academic indiscretions. The
article noted that all of the recent revelations had yet to spark a new probe
from the NCAA, but that one state senator would like to see an actual criminal
investigation, as well. Republican State
Senator Thom Goolsby had recently written on his blog, Carolina Columns, that UNC’s continued academic integrity issues
merited a tougher approach than had been taken up to that point. “The reputation of the state’s flagship
university is at stake and someone must take this matter seriously,” Goolsby
wrote. “Any prosecutor worth his salt
would turn detectives loose on staff and administrators involved in the fraud
and subsequent cover-up. If necessary,
the General Assembly could consider legislation to make prosecuting this type
of academic fraud easier.”
Goolsby, who had
received his law degree from the very school he was admonishing, continued with
his blunt comments. “The UNC academic
fraud scandal is like a pesky staph infection that just won’t go away for
university officials – nor should it. As
reporters at the Raleigh News and Observer continue to dig, they uncover more
and more dirty little secrets. The
latest problems swirl around a pus pocket called the Academic Support Program.”
He would end his
diatribe by stating what many in the public had long wondered: why had several
of the applicable governing bodies not stepped forward and demanded the
truth? “The UNC Board of Governors
should seriously consider asking for the resignations of current UNC Trustees
who failed to safeguard academic integrity,” wrote Goolsby. “They have shown little willingness to get to
the truth of this scandal and cure the infection. When UNC comes to the General Assembly for
more funding, university officials should expect that legislators charged with
representing the taxpayers will demand answers.”
* * *
What initially seemed to
be a minor article appeared in the News
and Observer on December 1, 2012, regarding the resignation of UNC’s
Associate Athletics Director for Compliance, Amy Herman. According to school officials, her move was
not related to the ongoing problems within the athletics department. Instead, Athletics Director Bubba Cunningham
and athletics department spokesman Steve Kirschner both said Herman was
resigning for personal reasons. Despite
those claims, there were past connections between Herman and the ongoing issues
plaguing the athletics department.
The N&O article said that Cunningham had reorganized the compliance
department in August of 2012. It was
then that he had hired Vince Ille to lead it.
Ille was covered in an earlier chapter, and his connections with current
NCAA officials were detailed at that time.
Since that August reorganization Herman had reported to Ille.
Herman’s tenure
coincided with the initial NCAA investigation that had found impermissible
benefits involving agents and academic fraud within the UNC football
program. In a September 2011 deposition,
Herman said that she had been inexplicably advised by school officials to avoid
creating documents that would have been subject to North Carolina’s open
records law, meaning that they could later be legally requested by the
media.
* * *
Following Mary
Willingham’s mid-November assertions that academic staffers at the school had
known all along about the fraudulent courses, more information would eventually
surface to back up those claims. A
December 8, 2012, article in the News and
Observer reported that various documents and interviews suggested some
faculty and athletic officials were aware of higher-than-expected Independent
Study enrollments by athletes in the African Studies department. The dates of the knowledge were as early as
mid-2006, but the voiced concerns apparently never reached top academic
officials at the school.
The article stated that
from 2001 through 2006, independent study courses offered by the Department of
African and Afro-American Studies showed up with regularity on the schedules of
men’s basketball players. In one year
alone, in fact, basketball players accounted for 15 enrollments. That particular year was when the team won
the 2005 NCAA Championship. Two years
later, athletes from the basketball program all but disappeared from those
independent study classes – classes which did not meet and typically only
required a paper for credit.
A university athletics
department spokesman attributed the decline in enrollments to a waning interest
in African Studies among basketball players, wrote the N&O. Evidence had
recently emerged that suggested there may have been other reasons,
however. Those documents of evidence
showed that officials within the department and within the Academic Support
Program for athletes started having concerns about independent studies in 2006,
which coincided with a lengthy story in the New
York Times about an independent study scandal involving athletes at Auburn
University.
The News and Observer article indicated that Robert Mercer, the former
director of the Academic Support Program, and John Blanchard, a senior
associate athletics director who oversaw academics, said they saw
higher-than-expected independent study enrollments from athletes in the African
Studies department. UNC records showed
more than 1,400 enrollments of athletes and regular students in that department
from fall 2001 to summer 2006, with some professors listed as teaching dozens
of students at a time. Blanchard and
Mercer reported the enrollments to Dick Baddour, the athletics director at the
time. They said they and Baddour then
took the information to the Faculty Committee on Athletics, but the committee
told them there was nothing to be concerned about. That appeared to be where the momentum
stopped for a deeper look into the enrollments and the African Studies
department, the article said. It is
important to note that there would later be significant concerns raised
regarding the accuracy of those recollections.
Namely whether those athletic officials truly raised “red flags” to the
Faculty Committee on Athletics.
Members of that Faculty
Committee on Athletics, which had oversight of athletic matters on campus, told
reporter Dan Kane that they did not recall such a warning. Committee minutes from 2006 reflected some
discussion about independent studies and included a reference to the New York Times report, which was
published on July 14, 2006. In that
Auburn University case, many athletes had used the independent studies courses
to boost their grade point average.
Regarding that 2006 meeting of UNC’s Faculty
Committee on Athletics from November, “The committee has conducted a review of
student athletes’ registrations in independent study courses and has an
interest in receiving current information in this regard,” the minutes
said. Two months later, the committee
inexplicably reported: “No sense exists
of a current problem.” Robert Mercer was then tasked with
tracking independent studies, the discussion apparently never went beyond the
faculty athletics committee, and the African Studies department was not looked
at any further.
The Faculty Committee on
Athletics appeared to be comprised of eleven members in 2006, and several
athletics department personnel also attended many of its meetings. There were several interesting ties between
some of the committee members and UNC’s basketball program. Barbara Wildemuth was a professor and associate
dean for academic affairs at the School of Information and Library
Science. She was also the academic
advisor and a former teacher of Byron Sanders.
Sanders was a member of the 2005 National Championship team. Committee member Rachel Willis was an American
Studies professor, and on a university webpage she was pictured posing with
star basketball player Shammond Williams in 2003. English professor George Lensing was featured
in an article from the university’s General Alumni Association website. It said, “Former UNC men’s basketball coach
Dean Smith asked Lensing to talk with his players each year during a break in
practice.” Whether those various past
connections contributed to the quick absolving of any problems within the
basketball program is unknown.
* * *
The December 8, 2012,
article in the News and Observer went
on to say that the university did eventually launch a formal probe into the
AFAM department in August of 2011 – but that was five years after the Faculty
Committee on Athletics was first notified of concerns. Furthermore, the 2011 probe was only
initiated after the News and Observer
had obtained a transcript for football player Marvin Austin, which showed that
he received a B-plus in an upper-level African Studies class before beginning
his first full semester as a freshman at UNC.
The new information about the events of 2006 raised
more questions about how much concern some university officials and faculty had
about academic standards being lowered to help athletes remain eligible to play
sports, reporter Dan Kane wrote. It also
raised serious questions about the willingness of university officials to
report what they knew about the problems in the African Studies department, and
potentially other curriculums, as well.
Considering that the May
2012 internal probe was conducted by academic officials within the College of
Arts and Sciences, which was home to the African Studies department, it would
have stood to reason that the 2006 independent studies issue would have been
included. No mention was made that there
had been prior concerns about the department, however. At the very least that oversight suggested a
lack of record-keeping and/or communication; a worst-case scenario would be
that there had been a deliberate withholding of information.
A report was released in
late July of 2012 from a special faculty subcommittee. A reference was made in the report about
Robert Mercer and John Blanchard meeting with the Faculty Athletics Committee
all the way back in 2002 to discuss the teaching of independent study
courses. The two athletic leaders were
told that “faculty members have great latitude to teach courses as they see fit.” The report also stated that academic
counselors who worked with athletes therefore concluded that it was “not their
responsibility to question decisions made within academic units about specific
courses.” Minutes from that meeting did
not, however, show concern about the independent study courses. Also, for some reason they did not show
Mercer in attendance, either. As
mentioned before, the legitimacy of certain claims would be questioned in the
future. Was “red flag” information truly
passed on to the Faculty Committee on Athletes on various occasions?
* * *
As mentioned earlier,
the December 8, 2012, N&O article
reported that the years of 2001 through 2006 had a high volume of independent
studies enrollments in the AFAM department.
Records show that there were 1,433 in five years, with huge numbers of
the enrollments being for particular professors. In spring 2002, for example, one African
Studies professor was listed as having 70 independent study students under his
guidance. The documents say the
instructor of record was “not necessarily (the) instructor of supervision.” In
at least 20 other circumstances, either a professor or staffers in the
department were assigned 20 or more independent study enrollments in a
semester. Often those were for sections
that had originally been listed during the registration period as having a
maximum limit of one student.
During that time period,
the newspaper said, football players accounted for 172 enrollments, or 12
percent. Basketball players accounted
for 39 enrollments, or 3 percent. While
those were a relatively small percentage of the overall number of students
signed up for the classes, they were much higher than either team’s
representation of the entire student body.
The basketball breakdown can be taken even further. During the five years in question
(2001-2006), the basketball team had less than 30 different scholarship
players. Based on the fact that
basketball players had accounted for 39 enrollments, then it is possible that
every single player who was on scholarship from 2001 to 2006 took a fraudulent
independent study course. Even if the 39
enrollments were limited to a smaller pocket of individuals, the odds that at
least one player from each season took a course is mathematically high. Furthermore, an earlier chapter established
that seven players from the team’s 2005 National Championship team was majoring
in AFAM, and earlier in this very chapter data revealed that 15 independent
study courses were taken by basketball players during that title year.
Julius Peppers played
basketball for the last time in 2000, just before the search parameters of the
above data. His transcript that was
inadvertently made public, however, gave an idea of how the independent study
courses may have benefitted star athletes at UNC. His transcript showed that he was allowed to
enroll in four independent studies within the AFAM department – the first of
which was in the summer after his freshman year in which he had received an F,
two D’s, two D-pluses, two C’s and one B.
On the verge of not having a high enough GPA to participate in sports in
the fall, he got a B in his summer independent study course, a class that was
supposed to have been available only to “advanced undergraduate and graduate
students,” according to UNC
registration records and the N&O. Peppers would go on to receive a B and a
B-plus in two other independent studies, again allowing his GPA to rise about
the bare minimum that was needed to continue playing sports at the school. His transcript showed that he was enrolled in
the fourth class, but he would ultimately leave for the NFL without graduating.
* * *
James Moeser, UNC’s
chancellor from 2000 to 2008, told the N&O
that the high enrollment numbers in the independent study courses were clearly
an indicator of a problem and should have been brought to the attention of the
dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.
“That’s excessive, and it’s not normal,” he said. The dean during the time period in question,
Madeline Levine, said no one came to her about the issue. She reiterated that the concerns of Mercer,
Blanchard, and Baddour should have come her way. “I would have expected them to go to a
particular senior associate dean, or to have gone to me, or to simply call the
college and say, ‘We’ve got a problem,’” said Levine. “If it had gone to one of the senior
associate deans, then I would expect that that dean, with something as
irregular as that, would have let me know.”
The N&O had sought explanations for the
independent study enrollment decreases since receiving the data more than a
year earlier, the newspaper said.
Chancellor Holden Thorp and other administrators declined to talk about
it. Thorp was Madeline Levine’s
successor as dean of the Arts & Sciences College, but said he was unaware
of any problems with the independent studies until 2011. Attempts to reach the professors in the
African Studies department who had the highest numbers of enrollments were
unsuccessful. Former Governor Martin had
been scheduled to present his findings at a UNC Board of Trustees meeting less
than two weeks from the time of the N&O’s
early December article. He said he was
trying to pinpoint what the discussion was back in 2006 and determine if it was
the cause of the enrollment drop. “I
think you can expect that that’s something that we have to pursue,” Martin
said, “even if it takes us past December 20.” A closer look must not have
happened, however, as Martin’s findings would ultimately be released on the 20th
as earlier planned.
* * *
The
essential (and unanswered) questions:
-- Why had virtually every member of UNC’s faculty and academic staff,
which numbered over 3,000, chosen to remain silent regarding the ongoing
athletic/academic scandal that had encompassed the school for more than two
years?
-- Why had no one at the university taken Mary Willingham’s initial
claims of plagiarism seriously?
-- Despite apparent attempts to change the academic culture within UNC’s
basketball program and to do things on the “up and up,” why had Jennifer
Townsend refused to comment for any of the News
and Observer’s articles?
-- The NCAA never spoke to Mary Willingham during its 2010 investigation
into the school. Did university
officials even tell the NCAA about her past observations of cheating?
-- Why were so many associated with the UNC Board of Governors and the
UNC Board of Trustees unwilling to publically demand answers to the roots of
the ongoing scandals at UNC?
-- Why had Amy Herman been advised by school officials to avoid creating
documents that would have been subject to the state’s open records law?
-- In 2006, did the Faculty Committee on Athletics take a true and
thorough look into the high number of independent study enrollments? And if so, then how did they apparently miss
the disproportionately large number of basketball players who were taking those
questionable courses?
-- Did the connections between some members of the Faculty Committee on
Athletics and the school’s basketball program have anything to do with the lack
of attention that was drawn to the independent study courses?
-- The preceding two questions are both based on assumptions that the
Faculty Committee on Athletics had truly been informed of concerns regarding
athletes and independent studies. Was
that the actual case?
-- Were players enrolled in the possibly fraudulent independent study
courses solely for the purpose of raising their GPA’s – so that in turn they
would remain eligible to compete in athletics?
-- Players from UNC’s 2005 National Championship basketball team took 15
independent study courses that year. How
many of those 15 courses were potentially fraudulent, yet kept them eligible to
compete athletically?
-- Despite the abundance of information from Mary Willingham and also the
independent study data from 2001-2006, all of which pointed to direct cheating
meant to benefit athletes and potentially their eligibility, why had the NCAA
still refused to address the matter?