There are more details coming out about the academic scandal at the University of North Carolina.
According to NewsObserver.com, players on the 2005 North Carolina men’s basketball championship team took 35 bogus classes over two semesters.
Here is an excerpt:
During the season that the UNC men’s basketball team made its run to the 2005 NCAA championship, its players accounted for 35 enrollments in classes that didn’t meet and yielded easy, high grades awarded by the architect of the university’s academic scandal.
The classes, some advertised as lectures but that never met and others listed as independent studies, were supervised by Deborah Crowder, a manager in African and Afro-American studies who a report from former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein says graded required end-of-semester work leniently as part of a “paper class” scheme to keep athletes eligible. Crowder was not a professor and admitted to investigators that she assigned grades without reading the papers.
Of the 35 bogus class enrollments, nine came during the fall semester of 2004, when eligibility for the spring was determined. Twenty-six were during the spring semester, when the season climaxed with a victory over Illinois in St. Louis.
While players have not been specifically named, the numbers for men’s basketball are troubling:
The Wainstein report does not identify which athletes took how many paper classes, nor does it break out the number of athletes by sport who took them each semester. Wainstein said he was prohibited from releasing that information by the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a law that universities have repeatedly used to shield most education records.
But the report does show the number of enrollments by class and by semester for the three sports that used them the most: football, and men’s and women’s basketball. For a men’s basketball team that typically includes about 15 players a year, the numbers are substantial.
In the 18 years of paper classes, men’s basketball players accounted for 363 enrollments, an average of 20 enrollments per year.
Things are not pretty “doggone good” at North Carolina. The question on everyone’s mind now: will the NCAA actually do anything about it?
