U.N.C. Investigation Reveals ‘Shadow Curriculum’ to Help Athletes

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<p>Once Crowder set up one of these sham courses, any student could sign up for it. Fraternities came to know that these courses were easy A’s, and fraternity members have GPA requirements, so a majority of the non-athletes were Greeks. </p>

<p>And then there were a few students who weren’t in on the scam, and innocently took the courses because they were interested in the subject matter. Some of the courses were listed as lecture courses, and these genuine students were surprised when they never met. Cadwalader, the people who did this latest report/expose, hired some real academics to examine the papers that were the only requirement for these sham courses. Most of the papers were complete trash, plagiarized or almost entirely quoted, something like: “Shakespeare wrote: <ten pages=”" of=“” hamlet=“”>." But the real academics reported that a few of the papers were excellent college-level papers.</ten></p>

<p>As to the rigor of the courses, a number of the courses were “bifurcated.” Real students took the real version of the course, taught by a real lecturer and with real assignments. But other students took the sham version. Having read the report, I can’t conclude that the courses as approved were phony or not rigorous enough. Clearly, what happened was that the courses were not taught as approved. </p>

<p>Some fraternity members took so many of these phony Af Am courses that they inadvertently ended up with minors in Af Am.</p>

<p>From The Parr Center for Ethics website:

From dailytarheel.com:

I could just puke.</p>

<p>@‌ Sorghum
African-American Studies is a substantial and significant area of scholarly inquiry at many schools, and its supporters should be as mad as hell. We have only to look at Skip Gates and Cornel West when they were at Harvard, for example, to see the fine work in this field. I am riled that the UNC administrators and athletes cynically used this particular realm of scholarship for their own venal ends. I doubt that the athletes at UNC could quote W.E.B. DuBois, David Walker or Ralph Ellison or even Maya Angelou. Those guys cheated themselves out of an education wherein they would have been challenged to think, write and act critically. But I guess all of that is less important than athletic department revenues and a player’s possible eventual income from selling sneakers and sports drinks. </p>

<p>Deborah Crowder, the department secretary for African American Studies at UNC, was the instigator for this entire scam (which, BTW, started in 1992). She was the department secretary before then, but was unable to execute her schemes because the two scholars who headed the department previously were hands-on department heads who were concerned about the academic rigor of their department, and who would have noticed and squashed scam courses with no requirements. It was only when Julius Nyang’oro took over that Crowder, with his connivance, was able to drag a once serious department through the mud.</p>

<p>The [exhibits</a> of the report](<a href=“http://3qh929iorux3fdpl532k03kg.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UNC-FINAL-REPORT-EXHIBITS.pdf]exhibits”>http://3qh929iorux3fdpl532k03kg.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UNC-FINAL-REPORT-EXHIBITS.pdf) are damning.</p>

<p>Scroll toward the end. Around page 213 we can discover what happened in the fall of 2009, when Crowder had retired and the scam courses were briefly stopped: 48 football players had GPAs below 2.0 for that semester. The average GPA for the football team was 2.1. The football team quickly moved to reinstate the phony courses, by roping in the department head, Nyang’oro, to set them up.</p>

<p>A few pages above that, we read a memo concerning the anger of the teacher of Swahili 3, the third semester class in the Swahili language. Some of the football players in that course couldn’t say Hello in Swahili, and they sat in class having loud conversations in English. Not only were they unserious students, but they disrupted the study of students who were there to learn. Evidently these students were then put in an independent study version of the class, “independent study” here meaning “independent OF study.”</p>

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<p>They plagiarized their papers. That’s academic fraud.</p>

<p>Ahem…</p>

<p>Bielfeldt Athletics Administration Building
1700 S. Fourth Street
Champaign, IL 61820</p>

<p>Please take care in packing; we’ve been waiting nine years and wouldn’t want the Trophy damaged after all this time due to carelessness.</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

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This pretty much tells you what is going on all by itself. If NCAA was a serious organization, it would require periodic auditing/standardized testing of varsity athletes to make sure they are actually learning something–heck, a lot of the abuse would be stopped if varsity athletes had to prove that they could read well.</p>

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<p>My understanding was that African American Studies was chosen solely because the new academic head that Cardinal Fang mentioned* (sorry CF!) took over. They probably could have done this with any department though as long as they had a compliant administrator and department head; the actual nature of the courses didn’t matter since there apparently wasn’t any instructional content.</p>

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<p>I agree. Most football programs aren’t moneymakers but the ones that are moneymakers are the ones that both are at risk for this kind of fraud and most able to pay to do things right.</p>

<p>*EDITED</p>

<p>^^ *the new academic head that Cardinal Fang mentioned took over. I had nothing to do with the scam. :)</p>

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<p>What’s sad is that this might devalue the degrees of the legitimate African American Studies graduates. If it gets out that there were apparently a bunch of fake courses that anyone could enroll in and earn a minor in AfAm without actually learning anything, how does anyone know for sure if an AfAm graduate from this school actually took real classes? Without looking at transcripts, two AfAm graduates can have the same GPA and degree but one of them took real courses and did real work and the other one padded their schedule with paper classes and shadows.</p>

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<p>What’s really pathetic is that I saw that sentence, realized that it was badly stated, and got distracted by something else on my other screen and never actually fixed it. Though how can I know for sure that you were not an administrator in the African American Studies department at UNC??</p>

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<p>Even looking at the transcripts wouldn’t help. There were “bifurcated” classes some semesters, where some students took the real version and some took the fake version. And the real students, who were graded on real work, got lower grades on average.</p>

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<p>This kind of “everybody does it” cynicism gives aid and comfort to the corrupt. </p>

<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if a handful of other D1 athletic programs engaged in such breathtaking and systematic academic fraud, but it is far from a universal practice. Yes, most D1 schools will bend admission standards to accommodate recruited athletes—but some maintain admissions standards even for athletes well above NCAA-mandated minimums. Yes, many D1 schools offer academic counseling and tutoring services to athletes that go well beyond the services available to non-athletes, and many steer their athletes toward easy courses and easy majors to ensure their continued academic eligibility–but that’s not the same as the outright fraud perpetrated on a massive scale at UNC, where athletes were steered toward “lecture” classes that had no lectures and “independent study” classes for which the only requirement was to turn in X pages of written material that would then be automatically assigned a grade of A or B by an office manager without ever being seen by a member of the faculty, an adjunct, or even graduate student TA. This is the most egregious and systematic academic fraud I’ve ever heard of, and it’s clear that UNC coaches and other athletic department personnel were not only fully aware of it, but complicit in it. The NCAA has to mete out sanctions that make those handed to Penn State look like a mild slap on the wrist, including forfeiture of all games and all championships in any sport for any year in which any coach or any member of the team was implicated in this fraudulent scheme, as well as tough prospective limits on scholarships and post-season eligibility. Or alternatively and at a minimum, the university should be required to go back and recalculate the semester-by-semester GPAs of all athletes who took these fraudulent classes, omitting the grades received in the fraudulent classes; then UNC should be required to forfeit every game played by any player who would have been academically ineligible on the recalculated GPA.</p>

<p>If they are halftime students, they are not truly student athletes. It would make more sense to let them play football for 4 years as the farm teams for the NFL, and then pick up their scholarships whenever they wanted, either right after their “college” football careers if they don’t make the pros, or after their pro careers, assuming their brains aren’t crushed to mush by concussions. </p>

<p>Does anyone believe that this is the only bigtime football college where this happens or the only college that got caught? I just don’t get it.</p>

<p>Why don’t schools simply have an athletics major? </p>

<p>Schools are already granting performing arts & fine arts degrees, and I don’t see anything particularly scholarly about painting watercolors or singing/dancing in “Les Mis”</p>

<p>Michigan has their Sport Management major where they funnel many football and basketball players.</p>

<p>U Iowa has Sports Studies/Leisure Studies/Sport Mgt that is filled with football and basketball players.</p>

<p>Northwestern has Learning and Organizational Change and Comm Studies majors that are filled with football and basketball players. I am a graduate of the Learning and Organizational Change major at NU, anyone with an ACT score above 20 (or so) could pretty easily graduate with a 3.0 or above GPA if you take the right classes. The athletes know which classes to take and many graduate with a decent gpa.</p>

<p>This is what happens when extrinsic, and particularly monetary, value is placed on one’s academic achievement. People are going to find a way to game the system, rather than choose classes for the sake of learning. Maybe the NCAA needs to come up with a different way to measure an athlete’s academic eligibility other than their reported GPA. Like an annual SAT-type exam or something.</p>

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<p>Unless the coursework consists exclusively of practicing and playing in games then it might not be good enough to be honest. With majors like sports and rec management, if they are done right the students don’t just learn about playing the sports but also how the world of sports work including legal issues, media and publicity, organization, and business. With kinesiology you don’t just work out but you actually learn about how the body works and about biology, anatomy, and health. </p>

<p>Even with majors like fine arts, music, and performing arts no reputable program just has you paint something and get credit. You have to do real work and that’s the problem for these people – the time that they would have to put into any major has already been allocated to the sport they were recruited for. They don’t have time to learn anything else.</p>

<p>The solution may have to be dispensing with the pretense that athletes who don’t take real classes still count as college students. Make them paid employees of the university. The ones who do want to attend school can take a reduction in salary in exchange for full tuition, room, and board while the ones that don’t want to attend school can keep the money they earn and hopefully use it to set themselves up in whatever area of life they want to be in. There is no point in giving someone a college degree that has no meaning and changing the name of the paper major with no coursework from “African American Studies” to “Athletics” wouldn’t change the fraudulent nature of that practice.</p>

<p>I very much doubt that the NCAA will impose “severe” sanctions on UNC. The bottom line is, the NCAA is afraid of its own death penalty, after the impact of that punishment on the Southern Methodist University football program. SMU was a top ranked team in the years prior to the sanctions with the two big stars, Eric Dickerson and Craig James. SMU hasn’t been the same since, which has made NCAA squeamish about the death penalty. Besides that, consider the fact that the NCAA just significantly REDUCED the penalties it imposed upon Penn State. Finally, it’s no secret that as a league the ACC is a bit adrift with no clear direction. Severely punishing the league’s most bankable member might endanger the finances of the league, the NCAA might reason. </p>