NC: UNC fake-classes whistleblower resigns after meeting with Carol Folt

Via LH

Two years ago, I wrote about academic fraud involving the department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The fraud extended to more than 50 different classes. It ranged from no-show professors to unauthorized grade changes for students.

Many of the students who took the bogus courses were members of the football or basketball team. Seeking to protect the image of its lucrative athletic programs and to avoid NCAA sanctions (which it has done), the University noted that the fraud was not limited to athletes and that the other students who enrolled in these courses also escaped having to do course work or, depending on the course, show up for class.

Sadly, there was some truth to the University’s “defense.” The corruption was at least as much about academics (an unaccountable department devoid of intellectual rigor) as about athletics.

But now the University’s athletic program indisputably is in the dock. Mary Willingham, the whistleblower who denounced the existence of the fake classes at UNC, alleges that a substantial percentage of the football and basketball players she worked with as an academic counselor could not read at anything close to a college level.

The University disputes this claim, as is its right. But it has also browbeaten Willingham to the point that she resigned.

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