Did UNC's academic/athletic malfeasance start in 1993?
Published October 29, 2014
by Jon Sanders, The John Locke Foundation, October 28, 2014.
The staggering finding by Kenneth L. Wainstein’s investigation into UNC-Chapel Hill’s “shadow curriculum” for athletes — discussed in some detail by Jane Shaw at the Pope Center — was that it lasted not one year, not a few years, but an entire generation, from 1993 to 2011, involving (and I would say victimizing) thousands of student-athletes.
Perhaps the “paper class” system arose in 1993, but if so, it would merely have been the logical next step down the path that has led the once-proud university of the “Carolina Way” to its great shame. Consider these passages in autobiographies by two of UNC athletics’ favorite sons.
All-American linebacker Lawrence Taylor, who came to UNC-Chapel Hill in 1977 and was drafted by the New York Giants in 1981, wrote this in his 1987 autobiography LT: Living on the Edge (co-written with David Falkner):
There were a number of courses that were ready-made for football players. You know, large lecture classes, 1,200 people or more, with two tests – a midterm and a final – both multiple choice. In those courses, you’re gonna get what the guy sitting next to you gets. The only thing you have to do is remember not to copy the same name on your paper. But there are only so many of these courses.
I did take some courses I cared about and learned things from, but that didn’t get me through school. I learned every little bit I could about how things worked, and I took advantage of them. The rules, for example, said I had to take a full schedule of so many hours. I took half loads and made sure I had a good supply of add and drop cards, properly dated, for the end of the semester. Then I’d go around the school during exam week looking for those courses where 100 percent of the grade was based on that final exam. I’d sit next to somebody I knew, copy his paper, and hand in mine while slipping an add card into the pile of papers before I left the room. Simple. Any fool could grab a “C” that way.
Taylor called the system a “total fraud” that “doesn’t start with colleges” but whose ultimate fault rests with society.
Current men’s basketball coach Roy Williams was at UNC-Chapel Hill from 1968 to 1973. He played for the freshman team. He was not a student-athlete during the time he recounts here in in his 2009 autobiography Hard Work (written with Tim Crothers), pp. 51-52:
In the final summer of my graduate school year, I needed two more courses to get my degree. One was required and the other I wanted to be really easy. I heard about a guidance counseling course taught by Dr. Perry. I’d heard it had no tests, no papers, and no projects. That was my kind of class. My roommate, Roy Barnes and I went to find out about it and were told it was full. So I told Roy that we were going to see Dr. Perry at his house. Roy didn’t want to go, so he hid behind a bush when I knocked on Dr. Perry’s door.
When he opened the door, I said, “Dr. Perry, my name is Roy Williams. I’m in graduate school in health and physical education finishing my master’s. I need one more course to graduate. I would like to take your course, but they said the only I could get in was with professor approval. Dr. Perry, this is it for me. They told me your course has no tests, no papers, no projects — and I’m being honest with you, that’s what I want. I can contribute to the class with the best of them. Will you let me in?”
According to Williams, Perry allowed him into the class for having the “mighty big balls” to come over there and say that to him.
In other words, the system was broke well before 1993. To be sure, it is hardly a UNC-specific problem. As I wrote in 2011 (see comments) back when this was still beginning to unfold — years before Mary Willingham came forward about some athletes reading below a fourth-grade level:
The ongoing charade of college athletics requires, mostly in revenue sports, a pretense that functional illiterates who don’t know the past tense of arrive or the term ambidextrous belong in the same academic environment as, e.g., future brain surgeons (UNC) and rocket scientists (NC State). It is certainly an underlying problem here.
UNC’s downfall is the sheer, breathtaking, previously unheard of and nigh on unthinkable scope of the corruption of academics for athletics glory and money.
It is the bitterest of ironies that, in its annual quest for No. 1, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill achieved the top spot for worst athletics/academic fraud scandal of all time.
If anything good is to come from all this, it is that — in the weeks and months to come as this report’s revelations sink in, fester, and create upheaval — the nation’s institutions of higher learning will find a better way to offer athletics without harming a university’s first purpose. UNC can lead the way out. It offers a sobering, Terrie Hall-like cautionary example against athletics indulgence to the detriment of academics.
As I wrote earlier this year:
Beyond that, beyond the money, there is a long, sad train of barely literate athletes victimized by the universities and the NCAA’s system that “works to keep them on the field and get them through college, but it is a terrible failure at helping get them through life when the cheering stops.”
This situation has long been suspected, however — which means that the public has been willing to be blind to it, or at least to tolerate it insofar as it remains hidden. UNC is one of the top standard-bearers for college athletics, so this scandal resonates all the more.
By the same token, however, UNC can set a new course for student-athletes in revenue sports that could inspire other universities to follow. That should be the aim now.
