Massive Academic Fraud--Univ. North Carolina--Athletes

[astorian]

@Knowed_Out

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.

So, the department chairman was a do-nothing figurehead?

[Freddy_the_Pig]

@Whack-a-Mole

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.

Never among anybody who counted. The “talk” was more talk radio and bar chatter.

The disgusting thing about the NC scandal is that it’s more of an academic scandal than a sports scandal. The athletic department didn’t come to Nyang’oro and say “Hey, what do you say, can you create some easy courses for us?” He himself got the idea because, I guess, he thought black kids couldn’t pass otherwise. The athletic department glommed on and started steering its players to the courses only later.

[Chronos]

I think it’s even simpler than that. He was heading a department that consisted only of himself, and his duties as department head kept him so busy he couldn’t even teach his own class. I think he was just doing the same thing his “students” were: Taking advantage of the college to get credit for classes that didn’t actually exist.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Freddy_the_Pig

Never among anybody who counted. The “talk” was more talk radio and bar chatter.

The disgusting thing about the NC scandal is that it’s more of an academic scandal than a sports scandal. The athletic department didn’t come to Nyang’oro and say “Hey, what do you say, can you create some easy courses for us?” He himself got the idea because, I guess, he thought black kids couldn’t pass otherwise. The athletic department glommed on and started steering its players to the courses only later.

Is this the case? I don’t recall reading that anywhere; do you have a cite?

[crypto]

@OneCentStamp

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.

“Fabled deserving white kids who got bumped”?

I don’t want to turn this thread into a debate on afirmative action, but seriously? Do you think that affirmative action has no negative consequeces for the people who happen to be on the other end of that affirmative action decision? Those white kids aren’t fabled. They exist. And the consequences of choosing someone for any finite, limited opportunity based on anything other than that person’s qualifications are real and lasting. And wrong. Not just for the people affected, but for the capability and quality of our society overall.

When MLK Jr. asked to not be judged on the color of his skin but the content of his character, that meant just that. Affirmative action does exactly what King didn’t want… and to make a decision based on race (or religion or sex or any other irrelevant critieia) is wrong no matter who does it or what their motives are.

There are so many troublesome threads to this scandal. What people discover when they start pulling on those threads will be interesting.

One of the funniest things you wrote was that this scandal will hurt “the minority students who got pushed out the door with (now worthless) degrees”. I hate to tell you, but any kid who took those AfAm studies classes knew they were a joke. Those degrees were worthless BEFORE the scandal. THAT is what should bother you… Not the fact that the scandal has been exposed.

I think there is a lot of blame to go around, and I want to see accountability. But that should also include those students who took those classes and said nothing. I am not talking about an athlete who had no interest in going to college but had to for any chance to further their athletic career. I am talking about the other “students”… the non-athlete who took those joke classes and earned that joke degree without asking the question “how this could possibly be legit?”

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Freddy_the_Pig

Never among anybody who counted. The “talk” was more talk radio and bar chatter.

I believe you but I think more credence was given to the notion because back then the Big 10 really was only ten teams. They wanted to add other teams who were a better attraction (read generated more money) than little, crappy Northwestern. For a bit they figured the Big 10 could only have ten teams in it so someone had to go and Northwestern was at the top of the list.

Then they figured screw logic and the Big 10 got more teams while remaining the “Big 10”.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Is this the case? I don’t recall reading that anywhere; do you have a cite?

The Wainstein Report describes Nyang’oro as independently wanting to “help” struggling students and “student-athletes”:

Beyond his practical interest in delegating responsibilities to Crowder, there was a more compassionate reason for Nyang’oro’s willingness to go along with Crowder’s irregular independent studies classes – he had developed his own sympathy for student-athletes and his own interest in helping them to remain eligible. According to Nyang’oro, he had taught two studentathletes early in his career who were later forced to leave the school because they had become academically ineligible. One of those student-athletes was murdered shortly after returning to his rural hometown; the other soon got in legal trouble and wound up in jail. When he learned about their fates, Nyang’oro committed himself to preventing such tragedies in the future and to helping other struggling student-athletes to stay in school.

However I was relying on a second-hand report which may have overstated the idea that Crowder and Nyang’oro developed the courses independently. Per the Report,

Nyang’oro initially undertook to conduct all of his independent studies in accordance with the traditional format and requirements, demanding regular student meetings and updates on their paper progress. Over time, however, he began to get complaints directly from Crowder and indirectly from the ASPSA academic counselors about demanding too much from the student-athletes and requiring too many meetings. On one occasion, Crowder told him that the ASPSA academic counselors believed he was “being an ass” for demanding so much from the players and were rethinking whether they should be steering student-athletes to AFAM classes.

In light of that push-back from the ASPSA counselors, Crowder took it upon herself to
improvise with AFAM’s independent study classes. She did so by designing an irregular
independent study class that essentially took the professor out of the picture – substituting herself for the professor and substituting her standards for those that traditionally applied to independent studies.

So it sounds as if the athletic department was involved in creation of the courses earlier on than I had believed.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

Awesome cites, Freddy; thanks so much for bringing them to the discussion.

I didn’t know any of the background of the department so that was some good info.

ETA: I just found a fairly good article on Forbes by a guy named James Marshall Crotty that has links to the Wainstein Report and to other data points.

[Shodan]

[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net]

I pretty much assume that in general any college athlete degree is one in name only; that they took classes requiring minimal work or in regular classes they didn’t do the work themselves.

Haven’t yet seen any significant evidence to disprove this.
[/QUOTE]
Anecdotally, there is Joe Thomas, who was on the honor roll four years running and an Academic All-American. He received the Outland Trophy and was drafted in the first round (third overall) and is currently a starting offensive tackle in the NFL. He took regular classes and he certainly did the work.

So there’s that.

Of course, he went to my alma mater, not UNC, but FWIW.

Regards,
Shodan

[FuriousGeorge]

Steve Young’s law degree and John Frank’s medical degree (both multiple Super Bowl winning players for the 49ers) would disagree with the premise of the “enough to stay on the team” college efforts for student atheltes.

Former Tennessee Titan, Myron Rolle, and NBA Hall of Famer, Bill Bradley, would, also, like to throw their Rhodes Scholarships on the table, as well, to show just enough to win.

UNC, however, meh, it’s not like it’s Duke.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@Shodan

Anecdotally, there is Joe Thomas, who was on the honor roll four years running and an Academic All-American. He received the Outland Trophy and was drafted in the first round (third overall) and is currently a starting offensive tackle in the NFL. He took regular classes and he certainly did the work.

@FuriousGeorge

Steve Young’s law degree and John Frank’s medical degree (both multiple Super Bowl winning players for the 49ers) would disagree with the premise of the “enough to stay on the team” college efforts for student atheltes.

Former Tennessee Titan, Myron Rolle, and NBA Hall of Famer, Bill Bradley, would, also, like to throw their Rhodes Scholarships on the table, as well, to show just enough to win.

There’s also Alan Page, who was one of the feared ‘Purple People Eaters’ on the Minnesota Vikings years ago, and is now one of the most respected members of the Minnesota Supreme Court. But he did once mention at an event that the coaches always had to do diagrams on the board for new plays, because several of the players were functionally illiterate and couldn’t read the playbook descriptions.

But all these descriptions of some athletes who were also good students is missing the point – of course there are always a few exceptional people. What are the statistics for student-athletes as a whole? How many of them actually graduate with a degree at the end of 4 years?
As I recall from my days at the University of Minnesota, for athletes it was quite a bit worse than for students as a whole. And even that was achieved only by lumping in all the athletes from minor sports – for the football team, I think only about a third actually graduated.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@Shodan

Anecdotally, there is Joe Thomas, who was on the honor roll four years running and an Academic All-American. He received the Outland Trophy and was drafted in the first round (third overall) and is currently a starting offensive tackle in the NFL. He took regular classes and he certainly did the work.

@FuriousGeorge

Steve Young’s law degree and John Frank’s medical degree (both multiple Super Bowl winning players for the 49ers) would disagree with the premise of the “enough to stay on the team” college efforts for student atheltes.

Former Tennessee Titan, Myron Rolle, and NBA Hall of Famer, Bill Bradley, would, also, like to throw their Rhodes Scholarships on the table, as well, to show just enough to win.

There’s also Alan Page, who was one of the feared ‘Purple People Eaters’ on the Minnesota Vikings years ago, and is now one of the most respected members of the Minnesota Supreme Court. But he did once mention at an event that the coaches always had to do diagrams on the board for new plays, because several of the players were functionally illiterate and couldn’t read the playbook descriptions.

But all these descriptions of some athletes who were also good students is missing the point – of course there are always a few exceptional people. What are the statistics for student-athletes as a whole? How many of them actually graduate with a degree at the end of 4 years?
As I recall from my days at the University of Minnesota, for athletes it was quite a bit worse than for students as a whole. And even that was achieved only by lumping in all the athletes from minor sports – for the football team, I think only about a third actually graduated.

[FuriousGeorge]

Idk when you went to school but first cite I dug up from 2012 was 83 percent for Gophers football. http://www.gophersports.com/genrel/102512aaa.html

This is the piece, I guess. The NCAA has started penalizing athletic departments for poor academic performance with player suspensions, scholarship reductions, and team banishments from postseason. Student athletes have to be much more student than ever.

[FuriousGeorge]

Too late to add to last post but the football rate was 69 percent. Overall athletics was 83.

Also in 2010, overall graduation rates at U of Minnesota was 66 percent. Graduation rates on the rise at U – The Minnesota Daily. The football team best that and even the basketball team dragging things down at 54 percent was at least relatively competitive with that rate.

[PastTense]

Updating this thread:

One of the worst academic scandals in the history of college sports ended with a whimper Friday, with the NCAA ruling it will not punish the University of North Carolina’s athletics department for deficient “paper courses” taken by thousands of students, many of them athletes, over nearly two decades.

In a 26-page decision released Friday morning, the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions concluded that because the lenient classes in the school’s African and Afro-American studies department — which never met, rarely involved university faculty and often provided passing grades in exchange for one short paper graded by a university secretary — were also taken by regular students, NCAA investigators couldn’t prove the classes constituted an unfair benefit for North Carolina athletes.

After years-long investigation, NCAA finds no academic violations at North...

[Ike_Witt]

So, the NCAA found that a huge revenue generating school ‘did nothing wrong’? Why am I not surprised.