BLOOMBERG: The flames just rose again beneath the $16 billion-a-year college sports industry’s scandal du jour. Mary Willingham, the academic-fraud whistleblower at the University of North Carolina, announced her resignation from the prestigious Chapel Hill, N.C., campus…
A former tutor to top Tar Heel athletes, Willingham helped reveal that the university had for years steered football and basketball players into fake classes that never met. She said that she and other academic advisers did so as a way of keeping the athletes eligible to play. The former chairman of UNC’s black-studies department is under criminal indictment in connection with the scandal…
North Carolina has acknowledged—and apologized for—the corruption but insists that it was “academic” in nature, rather than “athletic.” That distinction has apparently held sway with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which so far has declined to investigate the goings on in Chapel Hill. An NCAA investigation could lead to questions about the legitimacy of the university’s national men’s basketball championships in 2005 and 2009… (more)
EDITOR: “Academic, not “athletic”? Allowing students to play football without taking courses does not impact the athletic program? Then why did the NCAA brutally savage Penn State when the athletic program had nothing to do with a tenured professor, long since retired from the football program, molesting a youngster in the field house?
