Morgantown will be the site this weekend of one of the biggest college football games in the country. The immensely popular pregame show, ESPN GameDay, is on the WVU campus. Students camped out all week for a prime spot to watch the show Saturday morning and maybe get on TV.
West Virginia native and country music star Brad Paisley will be on-set at the close of the show around noon Saturday as the celebrity guest picker. As a life-long Mountaineer fan, you can bet Paisley will be picking WVU over TCU.
It’s all great fun, and it should be. Sports have always been integral to college life. Graduates, as well as fans that simply identify with a college, form strong bonds with their favorite teams. However, the pressure to win, combined with the growing financial stake in the success of revenue-producing sports, can distort priorities.
Consider the recently released comprehensive report on academic fraud at the University of North Carolina, one of the leading academic institutions in the country. The report is entitled “Investigation of Irregular Classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill” by Kenneith Wainstein, A. Joseph Jay and Colleen Depman Kukowski. You can read the report here.
Independent investigators determined that between 1993 and 2011, the University’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies ran a “shadow curriculum,” mostly for athletes, where students received high grades but did little or no work.
“These were classes that involved no interaction with a faculty member, required no class attendance or course work other than a single paper,” the report concluded. The program’s long-time administrator, Debby Crowder, who was not a faculty member, awarded consistently higher grades, often without reading the papers or evaluating their quality.
Over the years, 3,100 students—about half of them athletes—took one or more of these shadow classes. Investigators determined the athletes knew the class was a guaranteed “A” or “B” with little or no work that would help keep them eligible. Several academic counselors became dependent upon the faux classes to keep student athletes from flunking out.
The report says the scheme was well-known at the University—at least in the athletic department—but no one did anything about it. “Several administrators were aware of red flags about potential irregularities, but took little or no action to inquire about them.”
Crowder eventually retired, which lead to a change that “would require the whole football program to adjust to a new reality of having to meet academic requirements with real academic work.” That must have been a shock.
In November 2009, academic counselors made a slide show presentation to then-football coach Butch Davis and his staff explaining that Crowder’s departure meant an end to enrolling players in classes where they didn’t have to go to class, meet with professors, “pay attention or necessarily engage with the material.”
This is an epic scandal that undermines the value of a degree received by any UNC athlete who depended on the shadow classes to get through school. It would be unfair to use this to paint with a broad brush about what may be going on at other colleges. However, the fact that it continued for so long at one of the more respected academic institutions in the country should be an alarm bell for all colleges and universities that engage in big time athletics. When the fun on Saturday is propped up by fraud the rest of the week, we have a problem.