Another academic scandal; UNC is f-cked

If they had done it for Wallace or Montross, that's one thing. Rashad McCants? They should have let him flunk out, wouldn't have hurt them much.

He was no King Rice.

 

Carolina people are going pass this off as McCants being a malcontent and a head case, which is true. But I'm sure his allegations are true too.

 

McCants once said being at UNC was like prison, but in prison the classes you take actually have teachers and tests.

 

Know what's interesting about this story? ESPN has a UNC basketball beat writer who covers the games -- at least the home games -- but who apparently had nothing to do with today's story. Not mentioned in the credit line at the bottom of the story. Is this person on vacation? Or is that position intended merely to be the happy voice of team success? Anybody have insight into this one?

 

This wasn't a special accommodation done just for McCants, instead it was systematically done for many football and basketball players over a period of at least a decade. Nearly an entire academic department (Afro-American studies) was essentially converted into a sham to accommodate athlete eligibility. Can't recall any other academic fraud case quite like this UNC situation in terms of overall breadth and scope.

 

I'm still waiting for non-sports-related evidence that the University of Alabama exists.

 

Knowledgeable people could make the case that, when taking into account what the bulk of its students actually major in, UofA-Tuscaloosa's not even the best (perhaps not even second-best) school in the UofA system ...

 

That's the rub. Probably more than a grain of truth to it. But it's not exactly a secret that Rashad McCants wasn't the most stable sort when he was in school, in the NBA or at any other time.

B-b-b-but many people associated with it call it Blue Heaven. How could this be?

 

I hate to defend the university in any way on this mess, but to be accurate it was not the entire AFAM department. It was one professor who, by virtue of his being the department chair, was able to manipulate the system and create his special paper-only courses. It was his classes that the basketball and football advisers were guiding athletes to, not anyone else's.

The single course I took in AFAM in 2000, under a different professor, was no cupcake.

 

Correct. But, for what it's worth, Julius Nyang'oro was the department chair.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/06/06/3916244/attorney-julius-nyangoro-to-cooperate.html

 

Kinda of the same mind. The first thing I thought, though, was I wonder if McCants says anything if he's making $5 million in the NBA today.