“Beyond those university personnel who were aware of red flags,” Wainstein wrote, “there were a large number among the Chapel Hill faculty, deans and athletics personnel, who knew
that there were easy-grading classes with little rigor.”
“Little rigor” is a term of art that begs for definition.
A historian, Jay Smith, has written a book, “Cheated,” on this case,
and recently taught a class: “Big-Time College Sports and the Rights of Athletes, 1956 to the Present.” Students loved it; his classroom was filled.
Student athletes, particularly those from the “revenue sports” — basketball
and football — were steered to these poor or nonexistent courses, and in some cases, they were told they could sleep in class.
Put simply, for two decades until 2013, the university provided fake classes for
many hundreds of student athletes, most of them basketball and football players.
The chairman of the Board of Governors wrote in an email
that he had repeatedly asked administrators to purge people who were involved in “fake classes.”
“Their inability to answer this basic question undermines their credibility,” he wrote.
And Rashad McCants, a former player on the Tar Heels’ basketball team, said that tutors regularly wrote papers for students.