College Athletics: An Academic Fraud
One way the academic counseling staff kept these athletes eligible was by sending them to so-called paper classes — that is, no-show classes that required one paper (maybe), which would be generously graded. They all took place in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, under the auspices of the department chairman, Julius Nyang’oro.
.. Then, in January, Willingham was the subject of a CNN report in which she alleged that, of 183 North Carolina football and basketball players she had researched since 2005, 60 percent read between the fourth- and eighth-grade levels, and between 8 percent and 10 percent read below the third-grade level. That report set off a firestorm inside the university. At a faculty meeting shortly after the report aired, the school’s provost, James W. Dean Jr., described her data as “a travesty.”