Another academic scandal; UNC is f-cked

As a UNC grad I am, obviously, very disturbed by this.

 

Buh-buh but ... I thought Bob Knight was all about integrity!

 

That is a damn good pull. Although Locke's phony fraternity fakery wasn't an "academic" scandal, but instead a ruse to con recruits into believing Clemson, South Carolina was heaven for a black man.

In terms of true "academic" scandals I can recall (Derrick Rose/Memphis, Florida State football, Clem Haskins/Minny, Harrick/Georgia, etc.) none come even remotely close to these North Carolina allegations in size, scope, duration and sheer audacity. Not just one or two phony classes or some cheating, but essentially an ENTIRE ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT turned into a fraudulent sham by a major public university, has that happened before?

And, yeah, it certainly does seem to have been under-reported thus far (particularly by ESPN). My theory is that might be related to it coinciding with and being overshadowed by Penn State, which made normal collegiate scandal stories pale in comparison. I'd think it should pick up some traction now, though.

 

The Georgia football/Jan Kemp case in the 1980s comes to mind, but I don't know that it was this extensive.

 

Between this scandal and the Ann Arbor series on Michigan -- which wasn't nearly in the realm of scandal but was very instructive as to how things work -- I do hope people stop giving credit to the athletes when the universities are academically strong. Those are probably two of the top five public universities in America and they're pulling this.

Stanford is the only major college (BCS conference, I mean) athletic department that requires that its athletes even be functionally literate human beings. At the others, it's nice if they are, but it isn't necessary.

 

UNC is lucky they aren't in the Big East. ESPN would be destroying them right now.

 

What do you mean ruse? Are you saying dear old Tiger Town wasn't heaven for a black man?

I find myself in the very odd position of defending UNC here. Your post makes it sound as if the university ginned up this department ex nihilo, but I doubt very seriously that happened. I suspect the department already was (or was trending toward becoming) a sham, and UNC's athletes and their enablers picked up on it. Now what should have been done was somebody noticing that, damn, tons of athletes are doing tons of independent study hours in that department. Now why no one noticed is the meat of the matter.

 

I think you might be painting with a bit too broad a brush there. I would argue that today's BCS-level football/basketball player is a helluva lot more academically inclined than he was 20 to 25 years ago. I'm not around it anymore -- last program I covered was a top SEC team in the late 1980s -- but it's certainly the case that he comes across way better on TV today than he did back then. We may not be talking Rhodes Scholar material, but certainly college material. The NCAA and its tighter standards have gone a long way in that direction.

 

Some of them might be. But none of them are required to be, that is my point.

Look at the best universities in America.

--UC Berkeley had an academic scandal not many years ago and has continued to produce the likes of Marshawn Lynch.
--Michigan.
--North Carolina.

Those are three of the top five public universities in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report. And their incoming freshman football players have average SAT scores in the 900s if they're lucky. The other two universities in that top five are UCLA and the University of Virginia, and I'll bet a million dollars their academic standards for athletes are no higher.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution tackled this subject in 2008:

http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/stories/2008/12/28/acadmain_1228_3DOT.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab

The biggest gap between football players and students as a whole occurred at the University of Florida, where players scored 346 points lower than the school’s overall student body. That’s larger than the difference in scores between typical students at the University of Georgia and Harvard University.

Nationwide, football players average 220 points lower on the SAT than their classmates — and men’s basketball players average seven points less than football players.

Other links show the gaps at Michigan, UCLA, Texas, Berkeley and such to be around 300 points.

 

I hear you LTL, but you said "functionally literate human beings" in your post to which I was responding. I suggested earlier that athletic programs should be made to disclose, in aggregate form, how their participants stack up to the student body as a whole. You and I are probably in agreement that many elite institutions are actually worse than their more pedestrian counterparts in this regard. By that I mean, UNC and Duke and Cal and Michigan and several others actually sell their academic souls, to a greater degree, than do, say, Ole Miss or Florida State.

But not stacking up to the student body at UNC doesn't mean that you're not a "functionally literate human being." And, quite honestly, there were kids at the schools I covered in the late 1980s who I doubt could read on a grade-school level. The NCAA's done a good job at rectifying that.

 

Based on what we're seeing our high schools turn out today my guess is that the intelligence gap between student-athletes and students will begin to close rather rapidly.

 

Look at my phrasing. I said Stanford is the only school that "requires that its athletes even be functionally literate human beings." I didn't say there were none at the other schools, only that it's not a necessity to be one.

Breaking it down, we could agree there are quite a few who are pretty smart -- at least smart enough to actually belong in college. Those guys probably have SAT scores in the 1100-1200 range, maybe even higher. So to get a team average down in the 900s, you have to have a whole lot of 710s and 750s and such.

I would bet that on every BCS team outside of Stanford we would be able to find a dozen athletes who fall below the bar of what we'd agree are "functionally literate human beings."