Several North Carolina football players took classes that lacked instruction and involved forged signatures, a report published by The News & Observer says.
One particular class — AFAM 280: Blacks in North Carolina — is under the most scrutiny. Of the 19 students who enrolled in the class last summer, 18 were football players and the 19th was a former player. The class apparently didn’t show up on the calendar until days before it began, indicating that it wasn’t intended to be available for general students.
An internal review by the school showed that 54 classes have evidence of academic fraud because they involved little instruction. What’s more troubling is that nearly all the classes were taught by one particular person — Julius Nyang’oro, who is the longtime chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies Department.
The News & Record’s report includes this damaging section:
Other records show that football and basketball players made up a majority of the enrollments of nine particularly suspect classes in which the professors listed as instructors have denied involvement, and have claimed that signatures were forged on records related to them.
Want to get even more sick? The department chairman who apparently headed this entire operation was pulling in as much as $170,000 a year. He apparently treated some of his classes as independent studies even though they were supposed to be lectures.
Not that you had any questions about how difficult academic schools are able to keep some athletes eligible, but we’ve seen just how shady they can get.
Between this scandal and what went on with Butch Davis and his “tutors,” it’s pretty obvious that academic fraud was rampant among some North Carolina athletic programs. What’s sad is that so many players who never made it in the NFL missed out on an opportunity to actually learn something. And how disgusting is it that someone would get paid more money than most of us would see in two years for essentially handing out grades to athletes?
Helmet knock to The Big Lead
