One
Paper-Class Central
The University of North Carolina is rightly proud of the academic achievements of its many “student-athletes” (a term studiously avoided in this book, for reasons that will become clear). The university fields dozens of athletic teams with hundreds of athletes, and most of them are capable and ambitious students who perform well in the classroom. Every year football and basketball players, along with athletes from the so-called Olympic sports, number among the success stories. Despite this record of success, however, UNC–Chapel Hill has been tarred by an academic-athletic fraud scandal the purpose of which was to enable athletes to cheat the system. The main argument of this book is that the athletes themselves were cheated in the process.
The underlying cause for the decades-long academic fraud at UNC is, we believe, straightforward. The university knowingly and eagerly admitted athletes with poor academic training or little to no interest in school and further served the needs of the athletic program by creating paths to academic eligibility that kept those athletes on the field year after year. Those eligibility paths led first to subtle compromises with academic principle and then finally to outright corruption.
This basic dynamic has been repeated on college campuses across the land for many years, and the nexus between the academic preparedness and commitment of athletes and the curricular fakery that developed at UNC—a particularly revealing example of a national problem—will be examined in greater detail in chapters 7 and 8. But the story of UNC’s specific form of academic malpractice really begins at the intersection of several historical currents, some of them specific to the environment in Chapel Hill and some of them reflecting changes in the landscape of collegiate sport during the 1980s and early 1990s. Opportunity, mutual need, convenience, personality, NCAA pressures, and sheer chance converged to push UNC toward systematic hypocrisy by 1993. Chapters 1 and 2 will explain the genesis of the now notorious paper-class system of athletic eligibility and show for the first time exactly how it worked when it was at its peak between the late 1990s and the middle 2000s.
Tangled Origins
Race lies at the center of the UNC story, and few stories offer a more vivid illustration of America’s conflicted relationship with race than the one involving sport and the black athlete at Carolina. The story of UNC’s scandal opens not on a gridiron or a hardwood floor, however, but in the offices and conference rooms of UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, where the emerging discipline of African and Afro-American studies (AFRI/AFAM) struggled for respect, standing, and resources in the 1980s. Like many universities around the country, UNC had established a curriculum in African and Afro-American studies amid the tumult of the civil rights era. Designed to redress regrettable intellectual imbalances in the standard curriculum, to help attract more African American students to Chapel Hill, and to create a more welcoming and affirming environment for all students, the curriculum had been created in 1969. Although it attracted few majors, its courses proved popular. During one extraordinary period of growth, while it enjoyed the vigorous leadership of historian Colin Palmer, the curriculum’s enrollment figures grew by an astonishing 850 percent in just seven years (from 251 students in 1979–80 to nearly 2,200 students in 1986–87).1 The curriculum’s teaching staff remained small, and it relied heavily on faculty rooted in other departments such as History, Political Science, and Anthropology, but AFRI/AFAM clearly enriched the undergraduate curriculum and was much appreciated by students. As Dean Gillian Cell would note in a letter to Chancellor Paul Hardin in 1989, UNC’s AFRI/AFAM curriculum had surged to become “the largest such program in terms of enrollment in the country.”2
By the late 1980s, however, the faculty who called the curriculum their home had grown frustrated by what some perceived as lackluster support from the university administration. When Colin Palmer accepted an appointment as chair of the History Department in 1986, the AFRI/AFAM curriculum endured several unsettled years without a new leader. For three years running, search committees struck out in their hunt for a prominent national figure to take Palmer’s place. (Palmer stayed on as a part-time chair for two years, and then a succession of acting chairs filled in for two more years.) Professor Sonja Haynes Stone called on Dean Cell to “end this state of limbo” by making an expeditious appointment in the spring of 1989, but time constraints and bitter disagreements over the quality of the leading candidate led to yet another failed search that year—despite what seems to have been a good-faith effort by Cell.3 The installation in 1990 of a highly regarded specialist of African American literature, Trudier Harris of UNC’s own English Department, brought sighs of relief and renewed hope for the future. But the good feelings would not last. Harris found no joy in administration. Before two years had passed, she decided to go back to the English Department to resume her former life as a distinguished professor.
Nor was the leadership vacuum the only problem. Despite the amazing enrollment growth since 1980, the college had done little to put additional faculty resources into the curriculum. Stone chided Dean Cell for the “snail-like pace” at which the university had invested in the AFRI/AFAM program. Only one permanent faculty member—political scientist Catherine Newbury—had been added since the early 1980s. (Stone would later refer to Cell’s failure to attract more black faculty to UNC as “an abomination.”)4 Inadequate staffing stood out as a perennial problem, and chairs pushed the college insistently. “As usual,” Palmer complained in 1987, “the curriculum is understaffed. It relies entirely too much on fixed term faculty to meet the necessary instructional needs.” Two years later the needs had become only more urgent. The curriculum’s introductory courses were “always oversubscribed,” according to its annual newsletter in 1989. Acting chair Sherman James called for “2–3 new tenure track appointments” as well as a new chair with the requisite national standing to provide “balanced and creative leadership” for an emerging discipline.5 Among the projects this new chair should tackle: the establishment of a research center for comparative African and Afro-American studies. It was hoped that such an institution, for which Palmer and others had already laid the foundations, would serve as an intellectual center of gravity that would boost the visibility of the curriculum and help to attract the brightest minds to Chapel Hill. The college supported the idea in principle, but progress had been slow.
In their annual report for the curriculum in 1990, the acting cochairs, Thadious Davis and Robert Gallman, pointed to the discrepancy between the curriculum’s always impressive enrollment numbers and its modest national reputation. The national standing of the AFRI/AFAM curriculum still lagged behind those of the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, Cornell, Indiana, Ohio State, Yale, and Penn. They noted, “An academic program the vast majority of whose students are taught by graduate students and temporary faculty” would never be ranked among the best in the nation. “Our program lacks prestige and strength” because the university had failed to make AFRI/AFAM an institutional priority.6
The struggles endured by the curriculum found parallels in the student experience on campus. Ever since 1968, when UNC’s Black Student Movement had formed out of the protests of the civil rights era, some had called for the construction of a campus building dedicated to the study and celebration of black culture. Leaders of the BSM began championing a “freestanding” center in the late 1980s, about the same time that the curriculum in AFRI/AFAM began to press its case more urgently with college deans. When Professor Stone died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm in August 1991, the tragedy kicked off a turbulent period in campus political life. Stone had believed, as she wrote in a 1989 letter to Dean Cell, that “the entire university must bear the onus of advancing African and Afro-American studies” and “increasing and enhancing the African-American presence at Chapel Hill.”7 Stone had been revered by many students, including key figures in the BSM, and her well-known commitment to these two imperatives—boosting the fortunes of the curriculum and enhancing the experiences of all black students, faculty, and staff at the university—served as a rallying point for student activists over the next several years. After months of controversy and debate, in September 1992 student protesters led a series of marches in which they demanded that the university commit to a freestanding center. In a sign of the depth and breadth of student feeling over the issue, UNC athletes joined in these marches and offered vocal support for the cause.8
Chancellor Hardin resisted these efforts at first, even after one dramatic late-night rally in front of his home. He feared that creation of a separate building would waken echoes of segregation and that the center might become a “fortress” rather than a forum for open discussion. But tensions escalated. “We gave him an ultimatum,” football player Tim Smith would later recall. “If you want us to be quiet,” they told the chancellor during one heated confrontation, “give us a BCC [Black Cultural Center] by November 13.”9 Later in the fall semester, after a committee that he had appointed endorsed the idea of a freestanding center, Hardin finally relented. By 1993 campus opinion had swung strongly in favor of a separate building for the Black Cultural Center, and fund-raising efforts had begun. In 2001, after nine million dollars had been raised from private donors, the university at last broke ground on the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center.
These events are relevant to the story of the UNC scandal because the frustrations of the late 1980s and early 1990s help to explain both the rise to prominence of scandal linchpin Julius Nyang’oro (as well as the wide latitude he was given by college administrators after 1992) and the attitudes of his longtime assistant, Debby Crowder, who had been the one indispensable staff person in the AFRI/AFAM curriculum since her hiring in 1979. After the decision of Trudier Harris to relinquish the position of chair of the curriculum, UNC leaders faced a quandary. The senior distinguished people to whom the college might have turned in previous years—Harris, Palmer, James—had either left the university or definitively left the curriculum’s leadership role. A national search for the chair position seemed out of the question, given the protracted pain earlier such searches had caused. Uncertainty and added turmoil in the curriculum were precisely what the college wanted to avoid in 1992, but the viable candidates to succeed Harris were few. The eyes of the dean fell inevitably on Julius Nyang’oro.
Nyang’oro had recently experienced a meteoric rise through the ranks in AFRI/AFAM. He had first come to the curriculum in 1984 as a postdoctoral fellow. He stayed on as a “visiting” faculty member through 1990, teaching a variety of courses on the political and economic development of Africa, focusing particularly on his native region of East Africa. After word got around that he had received an offer for a tenure-track position at another institution in 1990, the college felt pressure from others within the curriculum to make an effort to keep Nyang’oro.10 In 1989 acting chair Sherman James had reminded the dean that “the recruitment and retention of outstanding black academics” remained a pressing challenge in Chapel Hill.11 Now UNC faced the troubling prospect of losing the services of the young and promising Nyang’oro. In an unusual move the college therefore approved the curriculum’s offer of a tenure-track position to Nyang’oro, even though no real search had been conducted and no alternative candidates were seriously considered for the job.12
Nyang’oro received generous treatment over the next several years. In part this reflected his obvious merits: he won a teaching award in his first year on the permanent faculty, and he had already established himself as a publishing scholar with an active research agenda. But structural conditions and sheer chance also worked in favor of his rapid advance. He was granted tenure early, after only one year as an assistant professor, and when Trudier Harris left the curriculum in 1992, her absence created a vacuum that Nyang’oro was poised to fill. In the wake of Stone’s death and Harris’s departure, Nyang’oro stood as the lone remaining black faculty member based in the AFRI/AFAM curriculum. The other members of the faculty were all capable people, but none had yet earned sufficient scholarly distinction to overcome the symbolic affront that white leadership of AFRI/AFAM would have represented at this sensitive point in the curriculum’s history. One student activist had reminded Dean Cell, in a 1989 editorial in the student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, that she had confirmed “our worst fears” when she appointed a white male—the economist Gallman—as interim chair that year.13 After the loss of Stone, others in the BSM had immediately begun to push university administrators to show greater respect for the field by making the curriculum into a department.14 Julius Nyang’oro thus quickly emerged as the obvious—perhaps the only—choice to succeed Harris, even though he was of relatively junior status and had been a member of the permanent faculty for only two years. By the summer of 1993, in less than three years’ time, Nyang’oro had gone from the insecurity of “visiting” faculty status to become the tenured chair of one of the most visible and politically sensitive academic units in the college.
Nyang’oro put his leverage to good use. The college authorized two new faculty searches for the 1992–93 academic year, and Nyang’oro gained permission for four more such searches the following year. By the summer of 1995, with nine permanent faculty now on the staff after he had spent only two years at the helm, Nyang’oro could rightfully say that he had presided over the tripling of the size of the curriculum since the sad low-water mark of 1991. He had also shepherded through the college approval process a new modern language program, Kiswahili, that went into effect in 1995. And in that same year Nyang’oro began work on the proposal that would finally turn the AFRI/AFAM curriculum into a full-fledged academic department; the transition would become official on January 1, 1997.15 His predecessors had performed important groundwork, but Nyang’oro had clearly brought great energy to the chair position. The college responded to his efforts with resources and moral support, and by the middle 1990s the AFRI/AFAM curriculum had come to be a dynamic and intellectually exciting place.
From the very beginning of Nyang’oro’s reign as chair, however, the AFRI/AFAM curriculum was also marked by another characteristic: it attracted a disproportionate share of athletes—especially from the profit sports, and even more especially from the basketball team. To be sure, there would have been nothing sinister in the initial attraction. At a time when African and African American studies was at the forefront of campus discussion, and when UNC’s Black Student Movement actively promoted study of and respect for the culture of the African diaspora, it made perfect sense that athletes from the profit sports, who were disproportionately black, would take a new interest in the AFRI/AFAM curriculum. The curriculum, like several other small academic units on campus, also had a well-established track record of offering independent study courses—in part, no doubt, because the faculty wished to meet growing student demand and compensate for the limited course offerings available in a curriculum with few permanent faculty. Independent study courses were always a boon for athletes because they met irregularly and thus eased pressures on class and practice schedules. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, athletes routinely sought out independent study courses for their class schedules, especially during their playing seasons, and they had regular success finding them in the Departments of Geography, Philosophy, and Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures as well as AFRI/AFAM.
Athletes also streamed toward AFRI/AFAM, however, because the key figures in the curriculum went out of their way to be friendly and accommodating. A faculty member from another department, one who had frequent contact with Debby Crowder, remembered in 2013 that Crowder “wore her politics on her sleeve.” According to his recollections, Crowder had long thought that African American students at UNC had been handed a “raw deal” and that they deserved more help, and a more welcoming environment, than they typically encountered.16 One assumes that these sensitivities would only have been heightened by the travails of the curriculum and the controversies surrounding the Black Cultural Center from the late 1980s through 1993. Crowder’s sympathies were certainly not limited to students in the Athletic Department, nor were her kindnesses parceled out by race (Crowder herself is white), but athletic teams provided a steady supply of requests and demands and Crowder seems to have done what she could to meet them. According to former AFRI/AFAM faculty member Michael West, Crowder “took in hand and assumed a motherly relationship” with more than a few athletes.17 (When senior basketball player Mike Copeland gave his parting speech at the celebration that followed the 2009 national championship, he gave a shout-out to “Miss Debby.” “I know Miss Debby’s here,” he said as laughs rolled across the auditorium. Pointing into the stands, Copeland expressed heartfelt gratitude. “Thank you for everything, Miss Debby. I love you.”) Crowder got to know many players on the basketball team because she was fast friends with Burgess McSwain, the longtime academic counselor for basketball. McSwain—dedicated, tireless, and well meaning—“worked the system” aggressively and sought out academic paths that would make life somewhat easier for “her boys,” whom she loved with a legendary passion.18 She seems to have parlayed her friendship with Crowder into a new kind of partnership once Julius Nyang’oro joined AFRI/AFAM as a member of the permanent faculty.19
Nyang’oro also threw out the welcome mat for athletes. In part this may have reflected his own enthusiasm for sports. In his first years on the UNC campus, when he served as a postdoctoral fellow, he supplemented his salary by tutoring football players in the Academic Support Program; his keen interest in UNC athletics may have derived from his hands-on contact with athletes in need of extra help in the mid-1980s. Certainly, by the time he joined the regular faculty, he made little effort to hide his enthusiasm. In the fall of 1992, at an Indianapolis seminar on pedagogy that had attracted college teachers from all around the country, Nyang’oro playfully teased two faculty colleagues who had earned their PhDs from Duke University. Sharing lunch before the keynote speech, he razzed them while passing on dramatic news. “We got Stackhouse,” he told them with his characteristic chuckle. He referred to high school basketball prodigy Jerry Stackhouse, who had been heavily recruited by both UNC head coach Dean Smith and Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski. Stackhouse had announced his intention to attend UNC the night before the seminar, and Nyang’oro, who followed the basketball recruiting wars closely, enjoyed celebrating this victory in the presence of Blue Devils fans. Later, in 1993, Nyang’oro exchanged pleasantries with Dean Stephen Birdsall. “As you continue to be swamped by much,” he ended his letter, “remember there is light at the end of the long dark tunnel: basketball season. See you there.” In 2009 Nyang’oro would also “guest coach” for the football team, and his emails show a pattern of socializing with Athletic Department staff who were ready to supply tickets and special access to a favored professor.20
Nyang’oro’s identity as a sports enthusiast was no secret among the student body, either. Adam Seipp, a Texas A&M historian who majored in African studies and history as a UNC undergraduate in the 1990s, took several courses with Nyang’oro and still regards him fondly as a former academic mentor. (Nyang’oro supervised the research for Seipp’s honors thesis, which he completed in 1998.) Seipp would sometimes joke with his parents back in Baltimore that there was one easy way for them to get a certain perspective on their son’s academic experiences in Chapel Hill. “If you’d like to see who I’m working with,” he would tell them, “look for the small Tanzanian man sitting behind the Carolina bench” during basketball games. Watching the games on television with his classmates, Seipp more than once spotted Nyang’oro in a choice seat near the court. “Hey, there he is—right behind Vince Carter!”21
Whatever his attachment to the players as athletes, Nyang’oro’s relationship to them as students became unusually close from his first years on the faculty. One of the earliest independent study courses he taught at UNC, in the fall semester of 1988, was offered to two basketball players with marginal academic records.22 How they had known to come to him to request such an independent study is not clear, but Nyang’oro’s history as an athletics tutor, the students’ weak academic profiles, and the existing friendship between Crowder and McSwain suggest that preplanning almost had to have been involved. Independent study courses are relatively rare offerings in the College of Arts and Sciences, and opportunities to pursue independent study are generally extended only to outstanding students whose intellectual interests or research agenda cannot be properly accommodated by the permanent courses in a given department or curriculum. Most faculty teach them irregularly if at all, and they do so only if they know the students and their abilities well.23 The structure of independent study courses tends to be much more elastic than for other courses, and faculty want to have no doubts about the work ethic or the intellectual gifts of the student(s) in question. The main product for a typical independent study course, at least in the humanities and social science fields, is a long paper reflecting a great deal of original research. Consequently, the student’s initiative, analytical acuity, and research abilities need to be well above average. In ordinary circumstances faculty do not agree to supervise an independent study for the random person who shows up at the office door.
We will never know the nature of the work performed in this independent study, but the two basketball players earned Bs in Nyang’oro’s 1988 course. They did so even though neither was an AFRI major and even though both had struggled in their other course work. One of the two students, who clearly needed much help, may well have been, like Adam, present at the Creation—the creation of rule-bending forms of curricular improvisation that would later define the entire course-fraud scandal. This player quickly followed up his 1988 Nyang’oro experience with two more AFRI/AFAM courses—one of them, in the summer of 1989, an independent study course in African American studies.
One of two things appears to have happened with this course. Either Debby Crowder assigned the student to an independent study section linked to the name of a graduate student or other part-time instructor (unfamiliar names show up in other course records as “instructors of record” in the early 1990s), or Nyang’oro handled the course himself. Nyang’oro, trained as an Africanist, really would have had no business supervising African American independent study courses. But we know that his name would later be attached to many fraudulent versions of African American and Swahili courses he was not trained to teach, and the player who had taken his 1988 independent study was in great need. (Despite compiling far more credit hours than necessary for a UNC degree, this player would never graduate; his course itinerary shows a straining and perhaps inevitably unsuccessful student.) With the game of musical chairs in the curriculum’s leadership position not yet having ended in 1989, it would have been easy enough for Debby Crowder to schedule Nyang’oro an AFAM independent study without raising an eyebrow. Here may be the first sign of what would become an essential component of the long-running course scandal: the manipulation of multiple subject codes in the curriculum—AFAM, AFRI, in addition to the later additions of SWAH (for Swahili), WOLO (for Wolof), and LING (for Lingala)—to disguise the multiple benefits distributed by Nyang’oro and those he persuaded or coerced into helping him.
In 1991, after he had become a tenure-track faculty member, Nyang’oro continued to serve the basketball team. In the summer he taught two more AFRI independent study courses exclusively for three basketball players, though none of the three were AFRI majors, and one of these players was given the benefit of pursuing both an AFRI and an AFAM independent study in the same compressed summer session. (The need again seems to have been acute: the player earned a 2.82 GPA in his courses with Nyang’oro, but he had a 1.75 GPA in all his other courses.) Immediately after, in the fall of 1991, another basketball player took yet another AFRI independent study with Nyang’oro; the player was the only undergraduate enrolled in a course section that would seem to have been designed for two doctoral students. Then, in the spring 1992 term, Nyang’oro taught a section of Topics in African Studies to two people. One of the two students enrolled was a member of the basketball team. This same player would subsequently take two other courses with Nyang’oro.
The pattern repeated itself the following year. Nyang’oro’s regular availability during the summers quickly became one of the hallmarks of his teaching regimen. The peculiarity of this practice deserves emphasis. Faculty cherish their research time during the summer, and because independent study courses represent uncompensated labor, few faculty consent to offer them in the summers, unless lab work or ongoing collaborative research projects make them easy to accommodate and convenient for the lead researcher. The history of AFRI/AFAM summer course offerings is telling in this respect. Before 1989, when Nyang’oro offered his first summer independent study to that exceptionally needy basketball player, no one in the history of the curriculum, going back to the early 1970s, had offered an AFRI independent study during the summer. One finds only a sprinkling of AFAM independent studies during the summers over those two decades, and none of them enrolled basketball players.24
Nyang’oro’s activity between 1989 and 1991 thus marked a sea change, after which AFRI/AFAM course offerings would always be partially dictated by the needs of the athletic program. In the summer of 1991, as noted, he taught three independent studies solely for the benefit of four basketball players. In the summer of 1992 he taught two more independent studies featuring six basketball players and three nonathletes. One of the six athletes would take a second independent study in African studies with Nyang’oro in the fall—he was the only student enrolled—even though Nyang’oro was on leave at the time.
The anomalous character of this fall 1992 course arrangement cannot be overstated. Faculty on leave and working on research projects hope to escape all entanglements with regular teaching and service duties. Indeed, when a leave is funded by the university—as Nyang’oro’s was in 1992—the university generally requires that no teaching be done; the point of the leave, after all, is to advance a scholar’s research agenda. Yet this basketball player was a needy one. He was on his way to completing a total of six courses in AFRI/AFAM identified either as independent studies or as “variable topics,” both of which could be repeated on the transcript multiple times. Nyang’oro had clearly come to see himself as a patron of the basketball team. In the spring of 1993 one finds two more independent study courses on the AFRI schedule. One enrolled four students, three of whom were basketball players. The other course enrolled one student only, and he too was a basketball player.
The experience of the athlete who took this second independent study in the spring of 1993 spotlights the newly busy intersection between the basketball program, which was clearly plotting this person’s course itinerary with special care, and the office of the receptive and obliging Julius Nyang’oro. Academic counselor Burgess McSwain, a longtime geography buff, had once studied in UNC’s Geography Department and had maintained relationships with a number of people there. For years she had sent players to that department for Special Topics and other courses she thought would benefit them academically. In the case of the 1993 athlete in need of extra nurturing, courses from geography and philosophy—another department that was home to several friendly courses—provided a safe harbor on several occasions during what turned out to be a treacherous curricular journey. Since 1989, though, McSwain had been cutting a new path through even friendlier territory, and she could not resist the temptation to use the developing Nyang’oro course slate as a life raft for her imperiled student. In a period of two years McSwain directed her challenged athlete to ten AFRI/AFAM courses, including at least seven with Nyang’oro. Some of the Nyang’oro courses were independent studies, but all of them, including lecture-style courses, had enrollments of fifteen or fewer students. All the grades from these courses, some of which had to have been scheduled after Athletic Department prompting, proved extremely helpful to the player’s GPA. McSwain certainly realized by now, if she had not recognized it before, that Nyang’oro was more than just another friendly faculty member. He was a curriculum head willing to place his own major, or a parallel major of his secret devising, in the service of athletes with checkered academic records.
Athletes outside the basketball team had also begun to hear the message. (Basketball had its own, physically separate, advising office in the Dean Smith Center until at least 2004, and this may have been one reason the favoritism tended to be basketball specific in the early years.) One football player who had annual eligibility difficulties at the end of each spring semester was still relying, in 1992, on summer courses such as Issues in P.E. to get his grade point average back over the eligibility bar in time for the fall playing season. But one year later, when he faced familiar problems after a difficult spring semester, he and his academic counselor adopted a new strategy. In the summer of 1993—the year Nyang’oro became the permanent chair—this player took three AFRI/AFAM courses, including one independent study in which he earned a B+. Although he never declared a major in AFRI/AFAM, this athlete nevertheless went on to take two more independent studies with Nyang’oro in the regular 1993–94 school year. Eligibility concerns never afflicted him again.
In that same 1993–94 school year, another telling change occurred. A wrestler, a women’s basketball player, a men’s soccer player, and at least one other football player also discovered the advantages of independent study with Julius Nyang’oro. By 1993–94 the AFRI/AFAM curriculum chair was providing a vital service for athletes in need. Athletics personnel knew it, and traffic was picking up.
Independent study courses were especially prized, but athletes found a medley of choices available to them in the early and middle 1990s. As is well known, four of the five starters on the 1993 national championship basketball team ultimately majored in African or Afro-American studies, even though only one or two other players had done so throughout the entire decade of the 1980s. The flow of athletes to AFRI/AFAM had begun suddenly in 1990–91. Their new awareness of the curriculum meant, of course, that in addition to the independent studies led by Nyang’oro, basketball players and other athletes had many other courses available to them, including Nyang’oro’s standard courses, Contemporary Southern Africa, Political Processes and Economic Developments in Africa, Policy Problems in African Studies, and several others. Nyang’oro frequently taught these courses, too, in small sections of anywhere between one and fifteen students. Basketball players tended to be overrepresented on the class rosters. In the fall of 1994, for example, two basketball players were given the opportunity to enroll in an advanced lecture course—AFRI 174, Key Issues in African and Afro-American Linkages—made available to no one else.
Unless the participants begin talking about their experiences someday, there will never be a way to verify whether any lecture courses from the early 1990s were the “no show” type that later proliferated in such staggering numbers. It will also be impossible to determine definitively whether Nyang’oro or his assistant, Crowder, ever purposely segregated athletes into certain lecture-course sections designed from the get-go for especially favorable treatment (though the AFRI 174 just mentioned seems a very likely candidate). But it would be misleading to fixate on these variables, which, despite their titillation value, were never essential to the developing system. Long before the paper-class eligibility scheme attained full maturity sometime around the year 2000, the Nyang’oro course menu served well one of its initial purposes: to provide athletes easy grades that kept them eligible and academically on track. The no-show aspect of the later courses constituted only an added frill, a logical extension of a devious curricular strategy founded from the start on one bedrock principle: the acceptance of an academic double standard benefiting athletes.
During the first decade of the course fraud, most if not all of Nyang’oro’s lecture courses appear to have had regular meetings, and players regularly attended those class meetings. What set the courses apart, and what made them the nucleus of the profit-sport athletic curriculum once ASPSA counselors fully recognized the nature of the gift they were being handed, was that they required meaningful work only of those students who were not athletes. Systematic preferential treatment—a consciously applied double standard—was the key ingredient in the curricular soufflé cooked up in the early 1990s. “It was commonly understood in these classes,” remembers Adam Seipp about his own course experiences between 1996 and 1998, “that the athletes were not being made to do the work the rest of us were doing.” Everyone was complicit in the scheme. “There was sort of this running joke” whenever regular students happened to encounter athletes in the hallways or on the way to class. “So did you guys do that AFRI paper? And everybody would laugh. And we all knew what was going on. It was not like it was sort of under the table.” Seipp remembers talking with classmates about the strange phenomenon of the foreign-language courses designed for an English-language-only clientele. “There were these Swahili courses that didn’t seem to involve any Swahili. And none of us were quite sure how you got foreign-language credit for taking a class that didn’t involve a foreign language. But it was understood that that was kind of an athlete thing.”
Throughout the 1990s athletes went to classes (at least in courses scheduled as regular lecture courses). They showed up and sat right beside nonathlete students who used the courses as genuine learning experiences. On occasion an athlete might even contribute to a class discussion, but, says Seipp, “it was pretty clear they weren’t doing the work. We all accepted that. For some reason, we all just accepted that.” Seipp attributes the passive compliance of the other students to the thrill most of them felt at being so close to athletic celebrity. “Being part of the Carolina undergraduate experience is, well, basketball. We were all a little bit starstruck. . . . They would come in with these bags of food that they’d been given in Dining Services, and, you know, they were nice guys. So they would hand everything out. At the start of class [one of them] would come by and hand you a bag of Dorito’s, and . . . that was just part of what we did in those classes.” Having the opportunity to become familiar with talented athletes and “nice guys,” some of whom would soon be making millions in the NBA, offered regular students sufficient inducement to accept the blatant double standard that left them disadvantaged and working hard for their grades. There was something for everyone in this developing scheme.
The players drew the most immediate benefits, however, even if the “benefits” consisted in part of being deprived of a real university education. Together with a bundle of a dozen or so other random courses that supplied As and Bs for the transcripts of virtually every profit-sport athlete, the courses of Julius Nyang’oro provided the GPA boost needed to offset the often dismally poor grades earned in the challenging courses the athletes could not avoid. One critical comparison tells the story. In the early years of the developing relationship between the ASPSA and Julius Nyang’oro, between 1990 and the fall semester of 1995, the eighteen athletes from various sports who were sent to Nyang’oro on multiple occasions earned marks that, on average, stood more than a full letter grade above their performance in all courses outside the AFRI/AFAM curriculum. When they ventured outside the suddenly friendly confines of AFRI/AFAM, they earned a 1.89 GPA. (This reflected grades earned not only in demanding math and science courses but also in various fluff courses.) But in their courses with Julius Nyang’oro over the same period, they averaged a solid B. Whatever the precise short-term objective for sending a player to Debby Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro—maintaining a player’s eligibility, freeing up time for practice or film work, establishing the appearance of a “full-time” course schedule in compliance with NCAA rules, or just taking advantage of a perk—Nyang’oro’s parallel AFRI/AFAM curriculum significantly eased the academic burdens shouldered by UNC athletes. It is hard to imagine that this was not, from the outset, the central purpose of these courses.
Table 1. First eighteen athletes with multiple Nyang’oro courses
|
AFAM |
OTHER |
JN |
AFAM |
OTHER |
|
|
GPA |
GPA |
GPA |
Hours |
Hours |
Hours |
|
2.85 |
2.51 |
1.94 |
12 |
18 |
101 |
|
3.18 |
3.08 |
2.4 |
30 |
48 |
75 |
|
3.03 |
2.74 |
1.52 |
24 |
36 |
53 |
|
3.28 |
3.06 |
1.75 |
21 |
30 |
106 |
|
3.36 |
3.2 |
2.23 |
9 |
24 |
122 |
|
3.0 |
2.55 |
2.06 |
12 |
27 |
101 |
|
3.3 |
3.0 |
1.71 |
27 |
39 |
106 |
|
2.88 |
2.83 |
2.0 |
24 |
42 |
85 |
|
3.4 |
2.87 |
2.1 |
15 |
33 |
107 |
|
3.2 |
2.03 |
1.81 |
9 |
24 |
98 |
|
2.74 |
2.36 |
1.69 |
15 |
27 |
39 |
|
3.23 |
2.97 |
1.88 |
24 |
39 |
113 |
|
2.9 |
2.21 |
1.64 |
12 |
18 |
106 |
|
2.9 |
2.75 |
2.09 |
9 |
12 |
52 |
|
2.9 |
2.61 |
2.0 |
9 |
21 |
116 |
|
3.2 |
2.62 |
1.8 |
15 |
30 |
129 |
|
2.92 |
2.71 |
1.73 |
15 |
21 |
46 |
|
1.15 |
2.24 |
1.72 |
6 |
27 |
112 |
Note: Hours and GPAs broken down into Julius Nyang’oro’s (JN) classes, AFRI/AFAM classes, and other hours.
Course registration and grading patterns show that, from very early on in the Nyang’oro era, the curriculum of AFRI/AFAM led a sort of double existence. The curriculum offered good teaching and valuable scholarship on a widening array of important subjects—subjects that took on ever more urgent relevance in light of the genocide in Rwanda, the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict, the so-called culture wars that raged in American politics and higher education, and other local and national developments that highlighted both the centrality of race in the American experience and the neglected importance of Africa in world affairs. The curriculum continued to recruit talented new professors, it attracted many passionate students, and it offered courses and programs that enriched the university undergraduate experience. The faculty—emphatically including Nyang’oro himself—often provided inspiring models of intellectual activity that was both engaged with and making a difference in the real world.
Yet already by 1991 the Athletic Department had come to understand and exploit the bonanza of high-grade opportunities that awaited athletes in AFRI/AFAM. How, one might reasonably ask, did the other faculty in the curriculum adapt to the developing situation? They were teaching large and labor-intensive courses for an academic department one of whose purposes—it had become clear to at least some of the undergraduate majors—was to “crank athletes through.” Did the other faculty see any warning signs? Did they offer any resistance to the developing scheme? After the course scandal went public in 2011, all current AFRI/AFAM faculty insisted that they had been blindsided, that they had had no idea that the department’s courses were being misused. That may well be the case. But at least a small handful of faculty who taught in the department in the 1990s seem to have sensed what was happening, and they did not always hide their disgust. Because he aspired to a career in academia, Seipp often sought out advice and conversation with professors he respected, including several in African studies: “The message I got again and again was ‘This is not the department for you.’ That was tough. And looking back . . . I realize how difficult it must have been [for them].”25
Unfortunately, things would not be looking up any time soon. By the mid- to late-1990s, when the football teams of Mack Brown also rose to national prominence, ASPSA counselors were primed to begin sending much larger numbers of athletes to the doorsteps of Debby Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro. They welcomed them with open arms, and at that point the “gaming” of the system began to resemble a system unto itself.
Boom Times
By the spring of 1995, when six football players, seven basketball players, and dozens of nonathlete students signed up for Julius Nyang’oro’s Political Processes and Economic Developments in Africa (of which several sections were offered), one would have been hard-pressed to imagine a more fertile cultural and institutional environment for the development of a course-fraud scheme favoring athletes. From the perspective of the College of Arts and Sciences, the AFRI/AFAM curriculum was thriving, its leader was energetic, and its enrollments were as healthy as ever. Given the university’s increased sensitivities about the needs and wants of the curriculum, and its commendable desire to attract, welcome, and affirm African American students on the Chapel Hill campus, the administration would have been disinclined to meddle intrusively in curricular affairs. Julius Nyang’oro was left to manage things as he saw fit.
One intriguing sign of the enhanced autonomy afforded AFRI/AFAM in these years comes through the evolving format of the annual reports submitted to the dean of the college. Throughout the 1980s, and until 1992, the curriculum, like every academic unit in the college, included in its annual report details about the teaching record of each faculty member—the number of courses taught, the number of students served, specific course numbers and titles, as well as notes about the number of honors or master’s theses advised and independent study courses offered. Beginning in 1992–93, however, the year that Nyang’oro took over the curriculum, AFRI/AFAM effectively abandoned this practice. In that year Nyang’oro (or Crowder or both working in tandem) provided the dean only aggregate figures about numbers of courses taught and students served, with independent study course numbers no longer individually identified as such. For any administrator who might have been interested in knowing, this switch-up would have made it impossible to see at a glance who was teaching what and to whom. (Other departments in the college—Communications, Math, Anthropology, Drama, History, Philosophy, and so on—continued with the traditional reporting pattern.) Then, between 1994 and 1998, Nyang’oro experimented with yet another style of reporting. In those years independent study classes were the only classes listed in the teaching portion of the report. Apparently seeing healthy independent study enrollments as reflecting well on productivity, the chair decided to draw attention to faculty generosity. But this practice of reporting independent study enrollments ended abruptly in 1998–99, when the department’s leadership began offering supersize sections of independent study that would have been hard to explain had anyone started asking about them. Nyang’oro evidently never had to justify his ever-changing reporting techniques, and so he and his assistant, Crowder, were able to escape one small measure of accountability that might have raised bureaucratic red flags about odd teaching practices.26
Nyang’oro and Crowder had also worked out a governance regime that confined important decision making to a circle of two. Nyang’oro frequently traveled to Africa in the summers, and sometimes even in regular semesters; in his very first summer as acting chair of the curriculum, in 1992, he left behind a memo stating that Debby Crowder would handle “any emergencies” that might arise. The following summer he specified in a similar memo that Crowder would “handle routine business as per my instructions.”27 Their exclusion from decision making helps to explain the reluctance of the rank-and-file faculty to speak out in protest. Necessarily wondering whether Nyang’oro’s frequently strange behavior had been endorsed or encouraged by the university’s administrative leadership—why was he left in charge for twenty years?—the fine working faculty of AFRI/AFAM found themselves voiceless and on the margins of a shady operation they were powerless to stop, an operation whose full dimensions they probably never grasped.
Then there were the sensibilities of Nyang’oro and Crowder themselves. Crowder’s connections to the basketball program only deepened over time (she eventually began a romantic relationship with a former basketball player), and everyone who knew her reports that she was always inclined to help those who needed or deserved help. Athletes recruited for the profit sports would have stood out as among the likeliest candidates for help, since many of them entered the university badly prepared for college-level work (a subject explored in chapter 7), and they often compiled grade histories that would have placed them at risk of academic disqualification absent helpful intervention from a friendly quarter. Every development in sport since the mid-1980s—the explosion of television revenue and the increased competitiveness it had created among the big-time programs, the rise of the millionaire coach, the intensifying rivalry between the remarkably successful Duke and UNC basketball teams, the rebuilding of the football program under Mack Brown, UNC’s increasingly close identification with its sports brand in the wake of Michael Jordan’s conquest of the globe and Mia Hamm’s emergence as the face of women’s soccer—pressured the university to admit more and more athletes with suspect academic credentials. In the profit sports between about 1990 and 1996, Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) reading scores around 300, or even below, were not anomalous at UNC.
Despite, or because of, these increasing competitive pressures, the NCAA had toughened standards in the late 1980s. Proposition 48, which went into effect in 1986, set benchmarks for freshman eligibility that sidelined first-year players who did not score at least 700 combined on the SAT or whose high school GPAs were below 2.0. In 1989 Proposition 42 added a punitive, and highly controversial, feature to the Prop 48 reform. Students who failed to meet the benchmarks set in Prop 48 would be ineligible for financial aid unless and until they demonstrated adequate performance in their college classrooms. This reform, which was quickly modified after a firestorm of protest ignited by basketball coaches John Thompson of Georgetown and John Chaney of Temple, would have effectively blocked access to college for the many underprepared athletes who could not afford to pay their own way while proving their academic chops as freshmen. African American athletes would have suffered disproportionately. (In the 1989–90 school year, 65.9 percent of the so-called partial qualifiers who missed the Prop 48 benchmarks were African American.)28 The NCAA would continue to tinker with its eligibility formula over the next decade and a half, and few talented high school players were actually denied access to college in these years. Still, the national debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s—echoes of which could be heard even in UNC’s Faculty Council, a university-wide elected policy-making body—reinforced for some, with Debby Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro almost surely among them, the idea that the black college athlete faced an unfair, discriminatory, and exploitative system.29
Facing great demands on the field and on the court, and confronting a daunting set of graduation requirements and NCAA standards, why should the players not get some help in navigating their course of study? Athletes already had their own tutoring system. Academic counselors picked their classes for them. Was it so wrong for instructors to take the help one step further? Nyang’oro, says Seipp, “was always cautious” in his handling of the athletes in his classes. Some of the athletes were quite bright, some were clearly challenged, but all had skipped the reading. In typical discussions in Seipp’s classes, he remembers, “about 60 percent of the class clearly had no idea what was going on.” Nyang’oro did not want to “humiliate” those who could not keep up or who had no interest in the material.30 So he went easy on them. Eventually, at least for a certain subset of their courses, he simply eliminated the expectation that they be present for anything at all. And Crowder, clearly of like mind, facilitated the athletes’ registration for courses that never met or rarely met and, whatever the format, required little or nothing in the way of real academic work. Nyang’oro and Crowder seem to have acted, at least in part, out of genuine sympathy and a conviction that athletes “deserved” the help—not realizing, perhaps, that they only compounded the deleterious effects of an institutional racism disguised by the nonstop celebration of athletic success.
The official report of Governor Jim Martin (discussed in chapter 6) has established that there were at least a half-dozen instances of the famed no-show style of lecture course between the fall of 1994 and the fall of 1997.31 But the best indicator of the direction of the AFRI/AFAM course fraud over the course of the 1990s is found in the numbers of students registering for independent studies—courses that, by their nature, carried no-show potential right out of the gate. From the tiny acorn of 1988, when two struggling basketball players took Nyang’oro’s AFRI 190 in the fall semester, a mighty oak soon grew. At first the uptick in enrollments is noticeable but not necessarily eye-catching. From a handful of students enrolled in independent study sections in a typical semester or summer session in 1990 or 1991, the enrollment grew to fifteen in the fall term of 1993 as well as fifteen in the following spring. Tracking only the enrollments in fall and spring semesters, 34 students took either AFAM or AFRI independent studies in the 1994–95 academic year, 38 in 1996–97, and 50 in 1997–98.
Keeping in mind that most of these students were assigned to one instructor, the numbers 38 and 50 already appear to be absurdly high. In what sane academic universe would any faculty member generously teach—in addition to his or her regular course load—50 students pursuing independent projects? Enrollment figures show, for example, that the entire History Department, with approximately a 50-member faculty, taught a grand total of 39 students in independent studies between 1987 and 1993—an average of 0.14 independent study students per professor per year. Over that same period, the Department of Classics had 11 students, Religious Studies 36, and Economics 20. Some departments had none at all. And AFRI/AFAM as a whole, over that same period, had had 86, almost three-quarters of the total coming in AFRI and most of them clearly attached to Nyang’oro (see figure 2).32 Yet by the mid-1990s, a typical semester had Nyang’oro teaching dozens of students in independent studies all by himself—some of them, perhaps, pursuing legitimate projects and some of them having been funneled to the courses through a registration process largely managed by Debby Crowder, working in conjunction with her friends in athletics and other places.
But Nyang’oro and Crowder were only just getting started. In 1999–2000—again, sticking to the fall and spring semesters only—86 students signed up for independent work, thus matching the six-year total between 1987 and 1993. The next year, in 2000–2001, the same courses attracted 122 students. And in 2001–2 a whopping 175 students pursued independent study in AFRI/AFAM. The number set an impressive record, but the record would not last long. In the 2002–3 academic year, 238 students registered for either AFRI 190 or AFAM 190. Then, in 2003–4 the true record was set when 291 students completed independent studies under Nyang’oro’s supervision, after which the numbers began a slow fallback in the direction of normalcy (263 in 2004–5, 149 in 2005–6, 55 in 2006–7). Summer enrollments in independent study courses, meanwhile, also broke records in these years. The summer of 1999 saw 32 students working on independent projects with Nyang’oro; 42 showed up in 2001 and 45 in 2002.
How can this phenomenon be explained? In the 1991–92 academic year, including the two summer sessions of 1992, only 19 students had taken independent studies in AFRI/AFAM. Even as late as 1996–97, the total number of students enrolled, including the summer sessions, was only 45. But by 2003–4, including again the two summer sessions that followed, the number had reached a stratospheric 341. What had happened?
Fig 1. Departmental course offerings of identified Independent Study classes between 1987 and 1993 (from annual reports)
First, there are good reasons to suppose that word had leaked out to other students on campus that certain AFRI/AFAM courses were remarkably flexible in their scheduling and surprisingly lenient in their demands.33 Emeritus history professor Donald Mathews, who served as an assistant dean of advising in the College of Arts and Sciences between 1999 and 2004, noticed a curious pattern soon after he assumed his position. Although Mathews himself never suspected the outright abuse of independent studies, let alone the existence of fake classes, he did notice that nonathletes came to him often, early during his tenure and before his own administrative habits were well known, to seek authorization for what he calls “transfers” from one course to another. (Mathews had the authority to approve late drop/add switches in all humanities and social science fields. But he never saw prominent athletes, who had other means of accessing such transfers.) “Many students,” he says, “wanted out of three specific professors’ classes and into a fourth.” The three AFRI/AFAM professors whose courses had suddenly begun to lose their appeal were “exceptional” scholars and teachers, but students were finding that the grass was greener elsewhere. “I don’t know the fourth [professor personally],” says Mathews, “but his name was Julius Nyang’oro.” Some students clearly thought “life was better in his classes,” but “I never approved a transfer for any reason.” Eventually, students learned that Mathews would not accommodate them; they stopped asking. Today he regrets that “the university hasn’t done much to help anyone understand” the scandalous events of recent years or the environment that made them possible.34
Fig 2. The number of identified Independent Study courses offered from 1999 to 2007 in African and Afro-American Studies
The evolution of independent studies in AFRI/AFAM certainly helps to explain the broadening of the scandal and the curious pattern that Mathews observed. Football standout Julius Peppers, the most famous athlete on the UNC campus in the spring of 2001, signed up for a section of AFAM independent study that happened to enroll 80 students—not 8 but 80! (Across the board, at UNC and at other universities, independent study sections typically enroll 1 student, though sometimes a small handful will be involved.) The Athletic Department was well represented in the spring 2001 course, with 3 football players, 3 men’s basketball players, 1 women’s basketball player, and 1 student—Peppers himself—who played both basketball and football. This meant, though, that 90 percent of the people in this section of AFAM 190, 72 of the 80 students, were not athletes. Nothing like this had occurred in the early 1990s. Word had clearly gotten around that good deals were to be had at the desk of Debby Crowder and the office of Julius Nyang’oro. Because they were naturally nice and accommodating—or, perhaps, because they wanted no unhappy students grumbling to the dean of the college—they took in nearly all comers. The spring 2001 AFAM 190 was one of many such courses, numerically dominated by nonathletes but serving athlete needs as well, that would be offered over the course of the next decade. An arrangement that had been designed at first with an athletics clientele in mind had been forced to expand and adapt as a secret became more and more an open secret.
The presence in that same spring 2001 course of several football players highlights another contributing cause for the explosion in independent study numbers after the mid-1990s. Football players began showing up in greater numbers in all of Nyang’oro’s courses in this period, and since athletes had to have their schedules approved—chosen, in effect—by academic counselors in the ASPSA, the rising incidence of football enrollments tells us that ASPSA personnel had become determined to share the fruits of the AFRI/AFAM cornucopia outside the men’s basketball team. The football team had recently enjoyed an unaccustomed run of success that brought them greater visibility. After taking over a 1-10 team in 1989, Mack Brown had catapulted UNC football into the national top ten. Between 1995 and 2002 UNC would send at least three dozen players on to the NFL. But with success came more and more talented recruits who would also be needing the same sort of academic help routinely offered the basketball team since 1988. Peppers, who had already taken one AFAM 190 in a 1999 summer session, got a healthy B in the spring 2001 AFAM 190, even though his GPA through the fall of 2000 in all non-Nyang’oro courses had been a dreary 1.32, only slightly above a solid D.35 From the late 1990s to 2011, football players bulked large in independent study courses. In the busy summer of 1999, Nyang’oro offered four separate independent study courses. Nineteen of the 35 students enrolled were football players. (Six more were basketball players—3 each from the men’s and women’s teams.) Summers would always remain the special preserve of athletes in the profit sports.
Remarkably, in discussions of the UNC scandal, the role of the independent study course has been largely overlooked. A deans’ report in May 2012 (discussed in chapter 4) offered few specifics on independent studies, and in his UNC-sponsored review of AFRI/AFAM courses between 1994 and 2012, former governor Jim Martin found only what he termed “inconclusive” evidence about the vast majority of independent study courses offered in AFRI/AFAM during the scandal years. He flagged a grand total of 10 independent study courses as “anomalous” (among the 216 courses so identified). On what grounds did he label those particular courses anomalous? The instructor of record had “noted the presence of an unauthorized signature on the grade roll.”36 This meant either that Crowder had signed the grade forms or that Nyang’oro had signed forms for courses ostensibly taught by other faculty—a serious anomaly indeed.
What this technical definition of anomalous overlooks, however, is that the “authorized” practices in these courses were perfectly scandalous in their own right. Adam Seipp, who took an independent study in 1998 in which 4 athletes and a handful of others were enrolled, never met with his classmates and never knew who else was enrolled in the course. This was, in no sense, a coherent course with a lesson plan, required readings, or a set of defined themes. Rather, it provided a dummy course number under which a collection of students could be gathered for purposes of registration and credit-hour distribution. Seipp completed an authentic paper that semester—he remembers writing about Sierra Leone—but there is no reason to assume that the athlete-friendly double standard openly observed in regular lecture courses did not apply also to courses where independence was the name of the game. In an independent study with 80 students, an instructor teaching his regular course load would never aspire or expect to read with care the papers finally submitted by his legions of enrolled independent students.37
Yet, astoundingly, the 80-student AFAM 190 offered in the spring of 2001 did not even show up on Martin’s list of “anomalous” courses, a list that many have taken to be definitive. Between the summer of 1990 and the spring of 2011, AFRI/AFAM scheduled scores of independent study courses that enrolled more than 2,300 students. After 1998 one finds supersize sections with 95 students, 89 students, 53 students (twice), 67 students, 57 students (three times), 60 students, and countless sections with 10 or 20 students. But all of these course sections, and the grades assigned in them, have essentially flown under the radar of those charged with reviewing the “anomalies” for which Nyang’oro and Crowder are thought to be responsible. Given all that has come to light about years of no-show lecture courses, hundreds of unauthorized grade changes, and one case of plagiarism discovered purely by accident in a course known to be anomalous, one could not be blamed for presuming that all independent study courses involving athletes between 1990 and 2011 were “anomalous” in the sense that they required little work and awarded virtually free grades to players who were valuable to their profit-sport teams.
In 2013 it was even revealed that assignments in the dummy courses run by Nyang’oro and Crowder were sometimes (if not always) created by athletics counselors who sought to ensure—at Nyang’oro’s insistence?—that athletes would at least have to go through some form of learning exercise in exchange for the credit hours and high grades on offer in no-show courses. In one email exchange published by the N&O, football academic counselor Cynthia Reynolds is shown arranging a chat with Nyang’oro “to talk about the assignment for AFAM 396 [independent study] for my two students.” Octavus Barnes, a counselor and former player, thanks Crowder in a separate exchange for having sent him the final assignment agreed upon for one of his students. Yet another email carried the subject line “Cynthia Reynolds’ AFAM topics.”38 The free-form independent study courses piloted in the early years of the course scheme obviously provided the template for this ostensibly legitimizing system of quid pro quo. In exchange for an unread or lightly read ten- or twenty-page paper on some acceptable topic devised by academic counselors, or settled in consultation with them, Nyang’oro would hand out three credits and a good grade.
The entire UNC course scandal might be seen, in fact, as a consequence of the “independent studyization” of a portion of the AFRI/AFAM curriculum. The lessons learned in those early courses for basketball players between 1988 and 1991—the convenience of few or no meetings, the absence of hands-on instruction, the final submission of some sort of paper that dealt with some preassigned topic, the handing out of a GPA-friendly grade to a struggling student—were applied, first, to new and larger sections of independent study after 1996 and eventually to other AFRI/AFAM courses, even including language courses, as needed. In the mid-1990s athletes were still expected to show up for normal lecture courses; the Athletic Department even continued sending “classroom checkers” to spot-check attendance in such courses. At some point, however, the expectation of attendance went by the wayside, at least in many lecture courses (in addition to all those regular independent studies in which no one had ever shown up for anything). University rules formally restricted students’ access to independent studies; no student was allowed to take more than twelve credit hours (or four courses) of independent study in the course of his or her academic career. But academic counselors in athletics, fully cognizant of that rule, signed up their athletes for independent study–style courses in AFRI/AFAM semester after semester. In some cases independent study–style courses constituted a third or more of the total number of courses taken at UNC. A parallel curriculum, one with drastically lower standards than those prevailing in regular courses, had emerged to serve the needs of a select student audience.
By the late 1990s the Athletic Department was no longer classroom checking the courses in the parallel curriculum that had been constructed—it would be good, someday, to hear an account of how and when this practice was discontinued for certain courses—but athletics personnel knew well what their students were getting out of their special relationship with their favorite professor. A once-subtle form of curricular manipulation predicated on the relaxation of academic standards for certain basketball players had hardened, by 1998, into full-fledged curricular fraud. Chapter 2 explores the routinization of the system.