"Gary Williams will tell you this, most of the coaches in the ACC felt that Carolina was a fraud in that they walked around like they were Stanford or Vanderbilt or Northwestern, but they weren't, they were not even Duke. They took the most exceptions the last few years of Dean Smith's career they took the most exceptions of any school in the ACC. Meaning kids that would not normally get accepted into the university, that were accepted to the university to play sports. I remember one year at Carolina they had five exceptions starting on their men's basketball team. So they were taking guys with very low level qualifications and then they would keep them eligible. By putting them in these courses. So if a guy was close to not being eligible and his GPA was a 1.8 he would then take a couple of these courses and his GPA would be up to 2.4 and then everybody took a deep breath and they did it again"
"And the thing about the coaches not knowing about it in football it's possible because the coaches at different positions would know about it, but it may not get to the head coach. But in basketball the head coach would know about it because he would have to approve dropping classes and getting into another class to stay eligible for graduation."
"Coaches and athletic directors, you go to NCAA meetings and there is a lot of squabbling and coaches and ADs start pointing fingers. When I first got to the ACC I had a problem with a few coaches and a few of the other guys said 'well do you really want to be the guy to turn Dean Smith in?' and you know as a young coach I said 'I guess not' and as young coach you don't want to turn in a Nick Saban."
Dan to Theo to Ben said:Please don't ever compare as similar, child sexual abuse and academic fraud
Infield Infidel said:
I apologize, I meant to compare the penalties, not the actions.
DrewDawg said:
Most of us understood that.
Infield Infidel said:
I apologize, I meant to compare the penalties, not the actions.
This is a great take and one I share.Chemistry Schmemistry said:It is a bizarre comparison. On one hand you have an administration cooperating with athletes to award eligibility and degrees using fake classes, and coaches look the other way. On the other hand, you had coaches looking the other way when another coach raped children, and athletes and the administration were not involved.
The UNC case calls into question the legitimacy of all of their sports teams over a 20-year period. It is likely the largest case of systemic academic fraud in modern US history.
The PSU case doesn't have anything to do with the product on the field, but involved absolutely despicable behavior. The perpetrator is deservedly in prison, hopefully for good. The person primarily responsible for failing to report or stop this behavior died before prosecutors could make a case against him.
The only similarity between the cases is that it's extremely likely the NCAA will fuck up the UNC case as badly as it fucked up the PSU case.
canderson said:This is a great take and one I share.
UNC's got a potentially bigger problem in accredition issue. This rampant fraud is something the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges likely can't easily step away from as they did in 2013 for UNC.
The NCAA will certainly fuck it up; not so sure the more overall important to the university accrediting agency will.
DukeSox said:Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education calls for UNC to lose its accreditation.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/10/24/unc-chapel-hill-should-lose-accreditation/
gryoung said:
Seems a little extreme/over reactive. Hit the athletic programs hard, but don't penalize alumni and current students who played/play by the rules. We're talking roughly 15-20 students per year that were engaged in this crap.
I think the professor is saying that he has added students this late in the semester to other classes, not that he has filled this class with non-athletes. Late add/drop is a red flag for academic fraud, so it looks like he's covering his bases there.DukeSox said:Discussion of adding "real" students to the classes to keep it legit:
Morgan's Magic Snowplow said:
3100 students over roughly 20 years is more like 150 students a year. So at any given period about 600 currently enrolled students, which is roughly 3% of the undergraduate student body. That is not an inconsequential portion of the undergraduate population to be receiving fundamentally fraudulent education.
They won't lose their accreditation for all sorts of reasons but this is a massive academic scandal and UNC should face serious sanctions, even if that hurts alumni and current students who "played by the rules."
Proof, please?gryoung said:
Yup - your math is correct, thanks for the catch. I still disagree with the broad-brush impact that comes with your position. In one form or another, this practice takes place in most of the "elite" athletic powers. These guys just happen to get caught.
gryoung said:
Yup - your math is correct, thanks for the catch. I still disagree with the broad-brush impact that comes with your position. In one form or another, this practice takes place in most of the "elite" athletic powers. These guys just happen to get caught.
gryoung said:
Yup - your math is correct, thanks for the catch. I still disagree with the broad-brush impact that comes with your position. In one form or another, this practice takes place in most of the "elite" athletic powers. These guys just happen to get caught.
gryoung said:
Yup - your math is correct, thanks for the catch. I still disagree with the broad-brush impact that comes with your position. In one form or another, this practice takes place in most of the "elite" athletic powers. These guys just happen to get caught.
Morgan's Magic Snowplow said:
I'm not convinced that's the case. Of course a lot of schools find ways to make academics easy on their athletes. But this goes far beyond what we think of as "normal" practices in that respect and also impacted a huge number of non-athletes. There is a significant qualitative difference here between this scandal and any other academic scandal of which I'm aware.
Smith really started to feel the heat from the rise of Duke under Coach K after the multiple Final Fours culminating in the back to back championships in 91 and 92. Carolina had won it all in 82 and then didn't get back to the Final Four until 91 - despite having several powerhouse teams and All-American players. The 93 team was loaded with what I would call "typical" Carolina talent - Montross, Phelps, Donald Williams, Calabria, Lynch, Salvadori, etc. I hated them for wearing baby blue, but I respected them. They played the game the right way and seemed to be legit students. After that team, Smith seemed to be willing to compromise on character if he could get a higher level of talent. The next year, the Heels added Rasheed Wallace, Jerry Stackhouse, and Jeff McInnis to the roster. IMO, all of them represented a lesser quality of character than the typical Carolina player I'd learned to despise. Just a couple of years later came Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison. (Jamison might get a pass - he seems to have been a pretty decent guy.) Then Makhtar Ndiaye, who was the nadir of character, IMO. After that, Dean was gone, but the damage had been done.
DukeSox said:
Further, while in more recent years the classes were filled with both athletes and non-athletes (lots of frat guys), if you look at the data in the report, it shows in the early years of these "classes", there were only 2-3 people in each class and they were all athletes (largely basketball players).
As in, these classes really were started to keep marginal student-athletes eligible, and expanded over time when other students enrolled.
So it was an athletic/academic scandal from day 1 in 1993, not an academic-only scandal.
Lots of smoke that these classes were started after Duke won back to back in '91 and '92 (after having been dominant for a half decade), UNC basketball was losing recruits to up and coming teams, and Dean needed to figure out ways to get more marginally-academic recruits in the door and eligible. Here is a summary:
Oh that's 100% what it is.Grin&MartyBarret said:
That "smoke" reads like it was quoted from a Duke fan blog and is just a bunch of conjecture about the character of various UNC players in the early 90s. The schadenfreude should be plenty. Trying to claim Duke as the cause of all of this seems pretty desperate.
BigSoxFan said:I don't get how Stackhouse, Carter, and Jamison represented "lesser" character guys.
I disagree. I think the specific allegations carry far more weight in providing a justification for sanctions than the nebulous, general indictment of loss of institutional control. I see IC as a cherry on top or where the NCAA runs when it has no or poor evidence to issue punishment under its bylaws. The issuance of sanctions solely under IC reminds me of when my mother used to cite authority "because she said so."Average Reds said:
Here's the thing that keeps spinning around in my head.
The most serious charge the NCAA can levy at a program or a university is "Loss of Institutional Control." And it seems to me that creating a shadow curriculum that is used to keep your athletes eligible across all of the revenue generating sports over a two-decade time span is the very definition of loss of institutional control. (Especially when the Chancellor admits that the reason they didn't discover it is that it was "hard for people to fathom" that a program like this could exist.)
If I'm the NCAA, I simply shut it down. All of it. Because the loss of institutional control is so great and the culpability so pervasive that it's pretty obvious that the school cannot be trusted to run a DI athletics program.
Now, we know that the NCAA won't do this, because they are not a serious institution. But when you stop and think about it, they really should. Just shut it down for a two or three year period and issue "show cause" letters for every single coach involved. (Which has the effect of ending their careers.) It's really the only way to root out the nest of corruption that has taken hold at UNC. And it sure would get the attention of the scores of universities who are running similar scams in an effort to prop up their wholly-owned sports ventures that masquerade as DI athletic programs.
As I said, it will never happen. But a man can dream.
Forget the math.Average Reds said:
Your math is still way off. Hell, the report itself acknowledged that it's likely that far more than 3100 students were a part of the scam over the years. That was just the number they could prove right now.
As to your last point, even if you are right about other schools, how does that mitigate UNC's responsibility? I don't get a pass for speeding just because others are doing it.
gryoung said:Forget the math.
I don't have specific cases to support my statement, or the desire to research them, but anyone who thinks other big-name athletic programs aren't running under the radar with similiar activities is naive.
The sports department should take a big hit. A big hit.
I don't really care about UNC. Saying the NCAA or Grand Pubah of Higher Education Certification should napalm the school is easy.What bothers me is the inevitable broad-brush effect that would be fallout from a decertification.
Kids applying for a job (resume impact). Parents struggling to pay off student loans for their kids (emotional/psychological). Kids who worked their ass off in the real academic environment.
I don't expect my speeding to get a pass because others do it. I also don't expect to pay a penalty because someone in my neighborhood cheated on his taxes.
It's perfectly coherent. All he is saying is you can create a metaphor for whichever side you're arguing for.Average Reds said:
Your last point is simply incoherent. You can't argue that what UNC does is similar to what other schools do and then argue that punishment for UNC is like being punished for doing something completely different.
gryoung said:Forget the math.
I don't have specific cases to support my statement, or the desire to research them, but anyone who thinks other big-name athletic programs aren't running under the radar with similiar activities is naive.
The sports department should take a big hit. A big hit.
I don't really care about UNC. Saying the NCAA or Grand Pubah of Higher Education Certification should napalm the school is easy.What bothers me is the inevitable broad-brush effect that would be fallout from a decertification.
Kids applying for a job (resume impact). Parents struggling to pay off student loans for their kids (emotional/psychological). Kids who worked their ass off in the real academic environment.
I don't expect my speeding to get a pass because others do it. I also don't expect to pay a penalty because someone in my neighborhood cheated on his taxes.
Average Reds said:
I'm going to be charitable and assume you are having difficulty clearly articulating your point. I'm not trying to be condescending - we all do it on occasion - but there's a lot of nonsense here mixed in with solid points, and I'll try to see if I can address them.
Others may think that UNC should lose their accreditation. It's tempting to want this, but the reality is that would be a deeply unjust result because there will be way too many innocent victims paying the price for an out-of-control athletics department. The ironic part here is that by trying to launder an athletic scandal as an academic one, the university has placed itself in a position where it's legitimate to have serious conversations about their accreditation. (Oops.)
I don't think anyone doubts that every major university does things that are similar in nature. What distinguishes this scandal from run-of-the-mill efforts to keep athletes eligible is the scope, the timing (two decades) and the futile attempts to cover it up at the highest levels of the university.
Your last point is simply incoherent. You can't argue that what UNC does is similar to what other schools do and then argue that punishment for UNC is like being punished for doing something completely different.
Was (Not Wasdin) said:
I didn't read his last point that way. I read it to mean that UNC students/grads who went there and did the legit work to get a degree shouldn't be punished by revoking the school's accreditation. The "neighborhood" isnt other schools, it is all the UNC grads (at least that's how I read it anyway).
Don't many graduate schools require an undergraduate degree from an accredited 4 year college? if UNC's accreditation is revoked, would UNC grads may be barred from admission to grad school? That seems unnecessarily harsh.
LeftyTG said:Syracuse is being summoned before the infractions committee this upcoming Thursday and Friday to answer for allegations related to, in part, grade issues/tutors doing schoolwork. There aren't a whole lot of details, but everything I've seen makes it seem the misconduct falls into the category of "stuff that happens at every major athletic department" (which is not to excuse the behavior). It'll be interesting, and perhaps telling, to see how the NCAA punishes this kind of behavior, in light of the UNC scandal.
Very well put. The SACS also needs to take some action like probating UNC until those degrees are voided and something to prevent this from taking place again. If not the SACS is also a sham.Morgan's Magic Snowplow said:
UNC's system was completely different. They required literally nothing from thousands of students, other than a "paper" that received no actual academic review and was often (apparently) primarily just a list of quotations, and awarded credit. That's not cheating the system at the margin - its a complete farce. That is simply gross academic and institutional malpractice. I would not favor UNC losing accreditation but the idea that this is merely an athletic scandal and that the institution more generally should face no repercussions is simply indefensible. What is the point of having any kind of oversight of academic institutions if they won't be sanctioned for giving degrees based on classroom education that never occurred? At a minimum, they should revoke all the credit for each of these fake classes and void the degrees of students who needed these classes to graduate, while offering the ability to those students (and former students) to make up the coursework for free (probably through online classes, given the logistics). That is the only way for the institution to be able to once again claim with a straight face that its degrees and transcripts reflect actual achievement and training in the classroom.
Skeesix said:Very well put. The SACS also needs to take some action like probating UNC until those degrees are voided and something to prevent this from taking place again. If not the SACS is also a sham.
I think it's also worth noting that if UNC were Boise state or something the hammer would already be coming down with respect to losing accreditation. Instead it's a 200+ year old institution with a huge alumni base so we're pacing around asking ourselves what we're going to do.
Gdiguy said:
I don't think it's the alumni base that really matters; like others have said, losing accreditation has enormous implications for all sorts of things that aren't at all related to athletics. UNC gets hundreds of millions in research funding (see http://research.unc.edu/about/facts-rankings/research-funding/) - losing accreditation would likely impact many of those (I'd be surprised if many of those grants can be given to non-accredited schools), and would have a hugely negative impact for faculty / grad students / postdocs livelihoods, all of whom have absolutely no connection to this scandal. You'd screw over every single current undergrad, many of whom similarly weren't taking part in this (and what happens to a sophomore who has 2 years of student loans? They have to try to transfer and hope that most of their credits will be accepted?). It's not the school history as much as the size of the school (and how little the athletics really matters in real-world terms of the school's economics).
I think you'd see an NCAA death penalty before you saw losing accreditation - I don't think that's a serious risk for any major university at this point without something insanely crazy (like the school automatically giving every student A's if they donated $5k or something). For a tiny school in the middle of nowhere, sure... but a school of the size of UNC there's just too many unintended consequences for it to be a serious outcome.
Skeesix said:
At no point did I say that UNC should lose its accreditation. I just want some kind of probation along with the action that MMS describes as his minimum. I am quite well-aware of the research impact as well. On the contrary, perhaps the NSF, NIH, etc. should demand from schools which are eligible for their grants some sort of assurance that some accreditation-imperiling academic scandal will not come from the athletic department's influence. I mean, if that's a legitimate worry for researchers, they should get some cover from the granting agency. Heck, Lamar Smith already has a bone to pick with the NSF ( http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2014/10/battle-between-nsf-and-house-science-committee-escalates-how-did-it-get-bad). I'm sure he'll be glad to help keep his Alma Mater SMU in line.
May as well eliminate the pretense of accreditation if they don't get to make that call.67YAZ said:As righteous as the cause may be, the volunteer reviewers at the independent, non-profit accreditation agency won't get to make this call.
"Just based on the (Kenneth) Wainstein report, this is a case that potentially strikes at the heart of what higher education is about," Emmert said Monday. "Universities are supposed to take absolutely most seriously the education of their students, right? I mean that's why they exist, that's their function in life. If the Wainstein report is accurate, then there was severe, severe compromising of all those issues, so it's deeply troubling. ... It's absolutely disturbing that we find ourselves here right now."
Read more at http://www.wralsportsfan.com/emmert-calls-north-carolina-report-troubling-/14120549/#e2P9kuP26bCe5Het.99
Roy Williams’ claim that he was gobsmacked by the Wainstein report shows that he is out of touch and basically running a rogue operation. He needs to resign. If not, UNC needs to do the right thing and fire him. He deserves it.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/28/4272207_whether-quit-or-be-fired-by-unc.html?sp=/99/108//&rh=1#storylink=cpy
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/page/TMQWeekEight1410228/factoring-academics-college-football-playoff-tuesday-morning-quarterback
People at the top of institutions often justify their high pay and perks -- Folt earns a taxpayer-subsidized $520,000 a year -- by saying the buck stops with them. Then, when something goes wrong, they claim they were not responsible and should not face accountability. There will be no consequences? Looks like character education is not on the curriculum at Chapel Hill.
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20141023/PC20/141029714
The scam included 1,500 athletes taking phony African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) classes that didn't exist. It lasted from 1993-2011, from the end of Smith's tenure to the eighth season of Roy Williams' ongoing stint as head coach.
Why waste time and wait for NCAA penalties?
Why extend the mockery of a sham?
North Carolina should immediately fire Williams, a part-time Isle of Palms resident.
It should vacate various basketball championships, <URL destination="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Tar_Heels_men%27s_basketball">including the 2005 and 2009 national titles.
The ACC also should act proactively, placing North Carolina's basketball and football programs on probation: No postseason play and a scholarship reduction for three years.
It's the noble thing to do, a way to restore integrity to an ACC that North Carolina has tarnished.
I like this post. Stripping an entire university system of accreditation seems just a tad heavy-handed.DrewDawg said:They don't have to pull accreditation from the entire school. The accreditor can revoke approval for that program.
Fred in Lynn said:I like this post. Stripping an entire university system of accreditation seems just a tad heavy-handed.