Potomac Books has announced the official release of our book, Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports. In anticipation of the book’s distribution, we would like to make available some documents that help to fill out the context for the story we tell. Over the next several days, we will post to our website letters and other source materials alluded to in the book. Some of these documents provide useful background, others help to illuminate the margins of the central story, and still others help to explain our motives for writing the book we ultimately wrote. Additional items will be posted to the website in the coming months as they become available-or as they become relevant to the discussion that grows out of the book.
For starters, see this early letter sent to Chancellor Thorp in the days after the first Faculty Council meeting at which scandal news had been discussed at length:
Jay Smith letter to Holden Thorp, Oct. 18, 2010
Jay Smith letter to chancellor Oct 18 2010 written at an early point in the scandal story (October, 2010), captures Jay Smith’s frustration with the UNC administration’s lack of interest in the athletic department’s role in academic malfeasance. It also shows Smith when he still spoke as a perfectly conventional faculty critic of athletics-one who operated with the assumption that athletes themselves are to blame for cutting academic corners and expecting to benefit from double standards. His views greatly evolved with the peer-tutoring he received beginning in the fall of 2011. (See page 62 of Cheated.)
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