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Carolina academic problems continue

The seemingly never ending academic scandal at North Carolina, which stemmed from an NCAA investigation into the football program in 2010 and led to a discovery of fraud in a department featuring significant  enrollments of football and basketball players, does not show any signs of letting up.  

The latest bomb shell comes courtesy of CNN, which conducted its own investigation in the matter and led with an accusation by Mary Willingham,  the UNC learning specialist who blew the whistle on the flaws in the system, who claimed one of Roy Williams players couldn’t read or write and offered to show him proof.  “I stand by what I said, and if he wants to meet with me and go through his players, I’d be happy to share that,” said Willingham, who worked in the tutoring program for student athletes from 2003 to 2010. “I have his scores and … I’m the one who taught him.  

“I went to a lot of basketball games in the Dean Dome, but Roy never came and sat with me while I tutored his guys.”   

Willingham also provided copies of emails that show twice last summer, she sent findings of her research into athletes’ reading problems to university officials, claiming 60 percent of the 183 football or basketball players at UNC from 2004-12 had were reading at a level between the fourth and eighth grades.

She told CNN  the university expects students to be able to read at least at the ninth-grade level to handle the workload. She provided those findings to the university five months ago, emails show.

 
“These guys are not getting the education they deserve, and that’s the bottom line,” she said.
 
Willingham, who has gone underground since her latest accusations, has said in interviews that she has received death threats and hate mail. UNC police spokesman Randy Young said investigators have contacted her and “are responding appropriately.”

As you can imagine, incendiary accusations like this, which aired on a national cable news network, did not sit very well with Williams, the  highly respected Hall of Fame basketball coach who has won two national championships in Chapel Hill in 2003 and 2009.

“I don’t believe it’s true,” Williams said.”It’s totally unfair. I’m really proud of the kids we’ve brought in here.   We haven’t brought anyone in like htat. We’ve had one senior since I’ve been here that did not graduate.”

“Anybody can make any statement they want to make but that is not fair. The University of North Carolina doesn’t do that. The University of North Carolina doesn’t stand for that.”  

Carolina senior officials are also upset. They say they have constantly asked Willingham for the data behind those findings.  “It doesn’t make any sense to us,” UNC Provost Jim Dean said. “If you feel you have the proof, why wouldn’t you show the proof? For the life of me I can’t understand it.” 

Willingham , 52, said she is bound by research regulations not to identify the athletes in question.

Wllingham brings up some good questions. How many athletes can do the work? She has our attention. Now she needs to support her findings if she cares about helping Carolina rebuild its academic integrity.  

There is a much bigger problem at stake here. How many regular students who attend college are capable of doing the work they need to do? A growing number of schools are waiving SAT requirements and accepting students because they need paying customors. Many of those students– not only athletes– are unprepared for college because of inadequate secondary school training. But they don’t get steered to special classes with teachers who hand out passing grades to student athletes for minimum work and attendance so they can retain their eligibiliity.

Willingham first disclosed her concerns about the athletes’ academic struggles and no show classes to The Raleigh News & Observer in August 2011.
 
She went public in an N&O story Nov. 17, 2012, saying that one student had admitted to never reading a book and another did not know what a paragraph was.
 
Willingham sent an email with the findings to Dean in July, and sent another the next month to Lissa Broome, UNC’s faculty representative to the NCAA. Broome shared them with several officials who are on a special group looking into academics and athletics. Among them: Dean and UNC Athletics Director Bubba Cunningham. Willingham also told them: “Of the 183 students, 45 had UNC GPA’s under 2.0, thus putting them at risk of academic disqualification.

 
“Ninety-four of the 183 had a GPA of under 2.3.”
 
Willingham said while she will not identify any students, she is willing to show UNC officials where to find the information. Dean said the university would take her up on her offer to identify the basketball player she says couldn’t read or write.
 
Other academic records and correspondence at UNC have shown the university has admitted academically challenged athletes who struggle to keep up with their schoolwork. Records obtained by The N&O show the tutoring program for athletes was steering them into no-show classes in the black studies department that only required a paper. The most controversial class was an intermediate language course on Swahili, and the term paper was allowed to be written in English. Investigations found more than 200 suspected or confirmed no-show classes since the mid-1990s within the African and Afro-American Studies department. There were also more than 500 suspected or confirmed grade changes, and hundreds of accurately named independent studies that lacked supervision.UNC has said only the department chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, and his longtime assistant, Deborah Crowder, were behind the fraud, and that it said did not have the intent of keeping athletes eligible. Athletes, who make up less than 5 percent of the student body, accounted for 45 percent of the enrollments and half of the grade changes. Perhaps the saddest part is the fact a department devoted to black culture was corrupted to cheat a predominantly black population of athletes out of the education they supposedly went to Chapel Hill to receive.  
 
Carolina, considered to be one of the best public universities in the country, is hardly the only school where academic fraud has taken root.        The CNN investigation found public universities across the country where many students in the basketball and football programs could read only up to an eighth-grade level,” the cable network reported on its website. “The data obtained through open records requests also showed a staggering achievement gap between college athletes and their peers at the same institution.”
 
It is a black eye college athletics, which are already being portrayed as nothing more than big business, don’t need at this point.

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Dick Weiss is a sportswriter and columnist who has covered college football and college and professional basketball for the Philadelphia Daily News and the New York Daily News. He has received the Curt Gowdy Award from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and is a member of the national Sportswriters Hall of Fame. He has also co-written several books with Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Dick Vitale and authored a tribute book on Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.

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