Holleratascholar.com is not a sports blog, but there is a recent story out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that I just had to jump on.

An 8-month investigation, commissioned by the UNC, headed by former federal prosecutor, Kenneth L. Wainstein titled, Investigation of Irregular Classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Wainstein report) found that between 1992 and 2012 the chair, Julius Nyang’oro and the administrator, Deborah Crowder of the Department of African Afro-American Studies were responsible for inflating the grades of student athletes and offering hundreds of no-show or “paper classes” designed to help them in meeting and maintaining athletic eligibility.

The investigation confirmed the college sports watching public’s worst fears: that for over 18 years more than three thousand UNC student-athletes maintained athletic eligibility thanks to the use of “paper classes” in African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) courses.  “Paper classes” are described as no-show classes labeled “independent studies” in which the only requirement is a research paper submitted at the end of the academic term.  These classes the report says, were part of a “shadow curriculum” developed by the then chair, Nyang’oro and department administrator, Crowder.

Evidence suggests that Ms. Crowder, who is not a member of the teaching faculty, often presided over the “classes”, met with student-athletes, assigned the research topics and graded papers for the sections in question. The scandal deepens as the report reveals that Ms. Crowder almost exclusively marked the papers with either A’s or high B’s regardless of the fact that most of them were written by tutors or contained plagiarized material.

I do not question whether the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill was ethically challenged, and lacked academic integrity.  My question for the reader is, did they as the, UNC commissioned Wainstein report suggests, act alone or was the Department of African and Afro-American Studies part of a University wide athletic eligibility scandal?

For further insight into the story checkout:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1344054-full-wainstein-report.html

http://marciamountshoop.com/2014/10/24/the-seemers-and-the-schemers-the-wainstein-report-and-uncs-repeat-performance/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/10/23/did-wainstein-report-whitewash-high-level-culprits-in-unc-grade-scandal/

http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/24/4261947/wainstein-roy-williams-lacked.html