Sports Business
By JOE NOCERA FEB. 12, 2016
NY Times
2-13-2016
(remainder at link)
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — I hadn’t realized when I came here this week that Sunday marked the first anniversary of Dean Smith’s death. But I was quickly reminded; the front page of the University of North Carolinastudent newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, featured a photograph of Smith, the legendary former U.N.C. men’s basketball coach, along with an articlethat was less about his 879 wins and two national championships than about “the lives he touched and the impact he left.”
I had come to Chapel Hill because I wanted to understand the effect of the terrible “paper class” scandal on the larger university community: the faculty, the alumni, the administration and others who care about what is undoubtedly one of the finest public universities in the country. What I wound up discovering is that there are two shadows hanging over U.N.C. One is the long shadow of the scandal. The other is the even longer shadow of Dean Smith.
If you follow college sports, you probably know about the paper-class scandal, but, just in case, here’s a recap: In 2011, an academic counselor named Mary Willingham began telling Dan Kane, an investigative reporter with The News & Observer in Raleigh, that North Carolina athletes were being steered to sham independent studies classes that never met. Students were required only to turn in a paper that did not even have to be literate. The paper classes went back as far as the 1990s. The grades the athletes were given were always high enough to ensure they were eligible to play.
Incredibly, given that most of these athletes were black, the fraud was being run out of what is now called the Department of African, African-American and Diaspora Studies. The two people orchestrating the fake classes were Julius Nyang’oro, the department head, and Deborah Crowder, the longtime department administrator.
Although the university initially claimed that the scandal had nothing to do with athletics, that was untrue. Kenneth L. Wainstein, a prominent lawyer, issued an authoritative report in October 2014 that noted that nearly half the students in the paper classes were athletes, “even though student-athletes make up just over 4 percent” of the student body. When they were interviewed by Wainstein’s investigators, Nyang’oro and Crowder said that their motivation was to help struggling students, especially “that subset of student-athletes who came to campus without adequate academic preparation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/s...-as-it-struggles-with-a-scandals-fallout.html
By JOE NOCERA FEB. 12, 2016
NY Times
2-13-2016
(remainder at link)
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — I hadn’t realized when I came here this week that Sunday marked the first anniversary of Dean Smith’s death. But I was quickly reminded; the front page of the University of North Carolinastudent newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, featured a photograph of Smith, the legendary former U.N.C. men’s basketball coach, along with an articlethat was less about his 879 wins and two national championships than about “the lives he touched and the impact he left.”
I had come to Chapel Hill because I wanted to understand the effect of the terrible “paper class” scandal on the larger university community: the faculty, the alumni, the administration and others who care about what is undoubtedly one of the finest public universities in the country. What I wound up discovering is that there are two shadows hanging over U.N.C. One is the long shadow of the scandal. The other is the even longer shadow of Dean Smith.
If you follow college sports, you probably know about the paper-class scandal, but, just in case, here’s a recap: In 2011, an academic counselor named Mary Willingham began telling Dan Kane, an investigative reporter with The News & Observer in Raleigh, that North Carolina athletes were being steered to sham independent studies classes that never met. Students were required only to turn in a paper that did not even have to be literate. The paper classes went back as far as the 1990s. The grades the athletes were given were always high enough to ensure they were eligible to play.
Incredibly, given that most of these athletes were black, the fraud was being run out of what is now called the Department of African, African-American and Diaspora Studies. The two people orchestrating the fake classes were Julius Nyang’oro, the department head, and Deborah Crowder, the longtime department administrator.
Although the university initially claimed that the scandal had nothing to do with athletics, that was untrue. Kenneth L. Wainstein, a prominent lawyer, issued an authoritative report in October 2014 that noted that nearly half the students in the paper classes were athletes, “even though student-athletes make up just over 4 percent” of the student body. When they were interviewed by Wainstein’s investigators, Nyang’oro and Crowder said that their motivation was to help struggling students, especially “that subset of student-athletes who came to campus without adequate academic preparation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/s...-as-it-struggles-with-a-scandals-fallout.html
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