Recent events, including the UNC athletic scandal, the Northwestern football team’s unionization efforts, Ed O’Bannon’s victory in federal court, pending concussion lawsuits, and Congressional interest in reassessing the viability of the NCAA, have made it abundantly clear that college sports require a major overhaul. It is well past time for […]
Jan Boxill has now officially been identified as a villain of the UNC athletic-academic scandal, but before the Boxill story can be properly put to rest, the University must come to terms with an embarrassing irony: Boxill was for many years empowered, enabled, and encouraged by faculty and administrative leaders […]
An anonymous contributor has submitted this interesting reflection on how and to whom the University should be apologizing in the wake of the scandal. When the Wainstein report came out Chancellor Folt apologized “first to the students who entrusted us with their education and took these courses,” and those who […]
In our previous blog post, “Navigating the Flagship Post-Wainstein,” we noted that UNC-Chapel Hill has gone to great lengths to create the appearance of transformative change even as it has sidestepped the major structural issues brought to light by successive investigations of its athletic-academic scandal. Since the spring of 2012, […]
With New Year’s resolutions bearing down on us once again, from the vantage point of paperclassinc one broad question looms over all others: Can American universities make the resolution to change the broken system of big-time college sports? Pressure is certainly coming from the outside. In 2014, a series of […]
The news from Notre Dame sounds depressingly familiar. Academic fraud has infected the storied football program, with several players already implicated and hints that “the scale of alleged fraud is comparable to the highly-publicized case at North Carolina.” Notre Dame can now be added to the long list of schools […]
A lot of time and energy has been invested over the past several months into the exposure of my real and imagined flaws. UNC contracted with a “three expert” panel that pored over statistics and concluded that my diagnostic testing and board scores (some of which they never even saw) […]
Written Testimony of Mary Willingham Commerce Science and Transportation Committee Hearing on Promoting The Well-Being and Academic Success of College Athletes July 9, 2014 I worked as a Learning and Reading Specialist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) in the Academic Support Program for Athletes from 2003-2010. […]
The testimony of Rashad McCants on ESPN’s Outside the Lines (OTL) on June 6 took the UNC scandal to new and more hideous heights. This is not because critics of the University learned anything particularly new that day. Star players took no-show classes? They had tutors providing them unlimited forms of assistance for […]
First and foremost, I will let the legal system (not Bradley Bethel or Andrew Perrin) sort out the case of my IRB, FERPA, and HIPAA. In a meeting on April 21, 2014, Chancellor Folt told me that it was up to a judge. I am prepared to answer all questions […]
At long last, the public release of Mary Willingham’s IRB application of 2008 makes it possible to comment directly on its alleged failures. (Until the form’s release this week it was unclear to Willingham and me whether the IRB still retained the original copy of the application. IRB officials did […]
The panel for the congressional hearing titled, “Promoting the Well-Being and Academic Success of College Athletes,” has been postponed until further notice. Whose interests are being looked after on Capitol Hill? Is it really about helping the unpaid college athletes who have no health care, no workers compensation, and are not […]
Today is my last day at Carolina, but my work is far from over. It became clear some time ago that the corrupt system of college sport would not be fixed at the ground level. The only way to dismantle a cartel is to go after their illegal money making […]
My colleague Andy Perrin is in high dudgeon over the media’s treatment of UNC. In a blog post this week, he expressed his resentment over the recent New York Times article that praised the investigative journalism of Dan Kane of the N&O. Perrin is convinced that the N&O‘s coverage of UNC […]
John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus with the Department of Sociology at the UNC-Chapel Hill, has written a letter to Joel Curran, Vice Chancellor for Communications and Public Affairs for UNC-Chapel Hill. The letter from Reed discusses the scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill and how the university has poorly handled […]
To read the text of the speech, please download the RMH Speech PDF.
Disclaimer: Mary Willingham initially objected to this posting; I thank her for relenting to my request and allowing me to use her web site as a platform to make it public. A great deal of energy has been expended since January, 2014 in an effort to disparage, discredit, and defame […]
The NCAA redesign is weak and still lacks in academic support. Read the NCAA Division I Steering Committee on Governance document.
To avoid technical discussion and to get right to the heart of the matter, I will simply say that the three outside experts who conducted the “independent” review of my data did not come close to replicating my analysis. They were unable to do so because they were denied access […]
The Women’s Sports Foundation is asking for you to sign-on to the Open Letter to the NCAA regarding the recent Northwestern decision. Please email Sarah Axelson ([email protected]) with your intention to sign-on as either an organization or an individual by April 15, 2014.
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