This may not be a joke, but it’s sure funny. Of course, being an NC State grad, I will admit to a little schadenfreude…
From this article, the retirement of AFAM manager Deborah Crowder caused a panic within the athletic department, because they had depended on her to fix the books to keep student athletes eligible. A couple of counselors put together a PPT presentation for the coaching staff on the impact of the bogus classes, which included this slide:
This puts Underwater Basket Weaving classes to shame!
It is a real issue and it’s not a joke, because the NCAA and universities use the shield of student athlete to collude to interfere with the athletes’ right to bargain for compensation and force them to accept ridiculous contracts.
Don’t forget that fewer than half the “students” who benefited from this program were athletes. Sure, this is an athletic scandal, but by the end, it will be a scandal about education and race.
I was reminded of the Harrick Basketball scandal at UGA, but that is much smaller and more the work of one man.
Seeing the NCAA vacate all the wins UNC had for a decade and a half would be impressive, but I wonder how much the school would really care. That money has already been made. Cutting every single one of their scholarships on the other hand, would really make the program tank without calling down a death penalty.
For my money, the BALCO scandal was bigger. This new scandal is very big, though. Both of them just ripped the cover off of what many people believed was actually happening – college athletes not attending any meaningful classes and most high level athletes are taking some sort of performance enhancing drugs.
Exactly. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that the non athletes are affirmative action admission decisions. Steering them towards junk classes is a way to insure they don’t all flunk out of school.
Right, and as someone who supports affirmative action, this makes me furious. The whole idea of affirmative action is to break the cycle of poverty, lack of education, unemployability. A scandal like this hurts literally everybody involved: the school, the taxpayers who funded this travesty, the minority students who got pushed out the door with (now worthless) degrees, and of course the fabled deserving white kids who got bumped.
Didn’t any legitimate professors in the African-American studies department resent being treated as a joke by the athletic department?
Or was that the price for the existence of the African-American studies department all along? “You get to teach about Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to real students… and in exchange, you take all our dumb black jocks and give them easy A’s.”
Actually, they weren’t. Per this article, word got out that the courses were so easy and they started attracting other types of students, especially fraternity brothers. There may be some overlap between fraternity brothers and students admitted under affirmative action, but on the whole they’re distinct categories. (And while I don’t by ANY means intend to defend UNC as an institution, they actually do not have a bad track record of expanding access while simultaneously helping non-athletes succeed in legitimate ways. Really underprepared students do not get in. Sort-of-underprepared students have access to tutoring services and a very good summer bridge program, in which I worked as a tutor for five years when I was a grad student.)
There was really only one AFAM professor, department head Julius Nyang’oro. He didn’t really teach anything. Administrator Deborah Crowder had been fixing grades for struggling players long before the AFAM department was created. Nyang’oro wasn’t really that hands-on to begin with and let Crowder handle all the administration duties, which included scheduling the bogus classes and assigning fluff papers. After she retired in 2009, he carried on the same practice until news started breaking out of all the grade fixing, so he retired in 2012 to escape the heat.
Integrity didn’t figure into it at all: just pure laziness.
I believe that this will be the start of a ripple effect across all of college sports. Much like the Ray Rice video did with domestic violence in pro sports. All the sudden after seeing a video of something people already knew happens they became outraged and started running around with the ban-hammer, zero tolerance etc…
I think we’re going to see many major colleges exposed across the nation over the coming weeks. I think Afro American studies courses are going to get put under the microscope at all schools now too. It’s always been pretty widely known that the majority of Afro American studies courses at massive sports schools were there just as GPA boosters for athletes (and apparently AA students). Now it’s out in the open.
It may depend on your definition of “college athlete degree”.
This sounds much closer to the truth, and even then, it’s less likely in schools with FCS, or even no, football programs and men’s basketball programs in “what are these ‘at-large’ tournament entry you are talking about?” conferences.
In four years at Cal, I never had a lecture course where anyone took attendance.
Also, when are “no-shows” punished? A basketball player who is going to turn pro at the end of the current season isn’t likely to be doing much, if any, classwork in his final semester, so if the punishment happens after he drops out, then what good is it?
This sort of thing has been a known problem for decades (case in point: the 1950 cheating scandal at almost the last place you would expect it - West Point). Howard Cosell used to rant about it quite a bit when he had a daily ABC radio segment (“Howard Cosell, Speaking of Sports”).
If Georgia’sCoaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball class in 2001 didn’t have an effect on toughening up student-athletes’ classwork, then what makes you think this will? I have a feeling that, if anything, all it will do is to make the schools double up on their efforts to keep this sort of thing from becoming public.
“North Carolina may have NCAA men’s basketball titles vacated!” Considering that (a) these would be from years ago and (b) ESPN, for example, is notorious for pretty much counting vacated titles anyway (whenever teams are ranked by titles, vacated titles are included, although they do mention the vacated titles in a footnote at the bottom of the screen), will this really matter? There could be a postseason ban (start the chants of “But this punishes the players already there for something that they didn’t do!” in three, two, one…and there’s a compromise solution to this; start the postseason ban after one year, so other schools will have scholarships to spare for transferring UNC players; I assume the NCAA would grant the usual waiver of the one-year sit-out rule for transfers from a school on a postseason ban).
That Don Guy: I attended Cal as well, and you’re right, no attendance was ever taken. Nor at the other colleges and universities I’ve been a student in or taught at…until now. Park University, a small university (but with several branch campuses, geared in part toward military personnel), does require strict attendance records be kept for all students, and that each class have a set policy (e.g., “6 unexcused absences = fail the class”).
However, even at Park, the system I mentioned for certifying that student athletes are or are not in danger of failing is separate from the attendance record. It’s just about their current (mid-semester) grade.
And you’re right, this system does little for major student-athletes at Div I schools. It’s really about not-quite-superstar (but still athletic scholarship) student-athletes, especially at non-Div-I schools.
I do not know if things have changed but back in the 80s/90s there was talk about kicking Northwestern out of the Big 10. Mainly cuz they sucked at the time (IIRC they had lost over 30 games in a row). Rumor had it they sucked because their football players were actually real students taking real degrees and really studying. Rumor also had it they were not kicked out because they raised the academic performance of the Big 10 noticeably.
At least that is the story my mom told me (a Northwestern alumni and big football fan). Take with a large grain of salt.
