Dark Days in Chapel Hill

Dark Days in Chapel Hill

If you ran a college and knew there was substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to educate athletes, you might cut corners—that’s exactly what the University of North Carolina did for nearly two decades.

By Gregg Easterbrook

The most recent college champions are Ohio State and Florida State on the gridiron, Connecticut and Louisville on the men’s hardwood. Of these only one, Ohio State, graduated more than 50% of scholarship athletes in the relevant sport in the title year. The schools’ profit for NCAA play in these two sports averaged $30 million last year. That’s before donations inspired by athletics.

If you ran a college and knew there was substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to educate athletes, you might cut corners. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did. Its shameful record is the subject of “Cheated,” an engaging new book by Jay Smith and Mary Willingham.

A report commissioned by the university and issued last year found that, over nearly two decades, 3,100 Chapel Hill students, about half of them athletes, took fake classes that required no work. The average grade in the fake classes was an A. No-show grades pulled up the GPAs of sports stars who otherwise would not have met the NCAA’s modest eligibility standard of a C-minus average.

Mr. Smith is a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Ms. Willingham was for many years an academic counselor there who brought attention to the scandal by granting interviews to the Raleigh News & Observer. The authors accuse their state’s prestige public campus of “broad dishonesty” and of stocking its teams in football and men’s basketball—the “revenue sports”—with athletes to generate profit, then breaking its promise to educate them. Ms. Willingham resigned last year and later sued the school—a settlement was reached this week—and both authors recount being shunned in Chapel Hill for helping bring the scandal to light, so they may have an ax to grind. At times, their account flirts with a tone of “if only they’d listened to me.” Nonetheless “Cheated” sounds an important call for reform.

Details of the scheme confirm the worst fears about “student athletes,” at least as regards football and men’s basketball. (Other men’s and all women’s collegiate sports generally have good academic reputations.) Some Tar Heels men’s basketball players, Ms. Willingham contends, read at a third-grade level. (A university official last year dismissed her research as “a travesty.”) As a student at Chapel Hill, Green Bay Packers star Julius Peppers failed real courses but got B’s in what were known as “paper classes,” barely supervised independent-study courses that required only a single research paper. (Mr. Peppers claims that he “earned every grade” he got at UNC.) “Cheated” reports that Rashad McCants, key to the Tar Heels’ 2005 March Madness title, “saw his GPA rise significantly—he even made the dean’s list—after a semester in which he had done no academic work.”

Like many large universities, Chapel Hill has a committee that grants admission waivers to top sports recruits. “Cheated” says that the committee admitted players who scored below 400 on the verbal SAT—that’s the 15th percentile, barely north of illiterate—or who were chronically absent from high school except on game days. There is no chance that a student so poorly prepared for college will earn a diploma. All he can do is generate money for the university.

Most of the phony classes described in the report were in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, under Prof. Julius Nyang’oro and a departmental administrator. The department had multiple subject codes for its courses, including AFRI, AFAM and SWAH (for Swahili). This allowed transcripts to appear to satisfy Chapel Hill’s distribution requirement, even if most of an athlete’s “classes” were within the same department. Mr. Nyang’oro resigned in 2012 and was eventually indicted for fraud, accused of accepting pay for “teaching” that was imaginary. Charges were dropped when he agreed to assist investigators.

“Cheated” details how Mr. Nyang’oro liked to hang around with athletes: He was even invited to serve as a “guest coach” for the football team. Tutors and academic-support staffers also enjoyed friendly access to the jocks. At football-factory and basketball-power programs, teachers and tutors who avert their eyes from grade fixing may be rewarded with courtside seats and sideline passes.

The authors and the report agree that Mr. Nyang’oro and the administrator perceived that their role was partly to make academic problems go away so that stars could tape their ankles. University of North Carolina officials did not want to know how athletes who had barely bested chance on their SATs were suddenly pulling A’s at a selective college. “Cheated” recounts two instances when staffers told superiors that football or men’s basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who made the reports.

Last year, according to Education Department data, UNC–Chapel Hill cleared $30 million in profit on football and men’s basketball, a number that does not include whatever part of the $297 million in gifts and grants received by the school last year was prompted by athletics, or $130 million in assets held by the athletic foundation affiliated with the college. Some of the gain is expended on sports that lose money, but football and men’s basketball are still profit centers. At a prestige university, the African-American studies department became a mechanism to exploit African-Americans. Players may as well have been picking cotton.

Across the big-college landscape, around $3 billion annually flows from networks to schools in rights fees for national TV broadcasts of football and men’s basketball. Ticket sales and local marketing add to the total. Meanwhile, the NCAA almost never sanctions colleges that don’t educate scholarship athletes.

Coaches and administrators make out well themselves even if their players don’t get educations. Tar Heels men’s basketball coach Roy Williams and football coach Larry Fedora each earn $1.8 million per year, according to the USA Today NCAA salary database. Speaking and endorsement fees for coaches rise with victory totals. Athletic director Lawrence Cunningham draws $565,000 annually, plus bonuses for wins.

Perhaps the reader is thinking: Why this worry about diplomas? Don’t big-college athletes go on to wealth in the pros? Surely starry-eyed teens with Greek-god physiques arriving at the University of North Carolina, or at any powerhouse program, believe they’re headed for professional glory in prime time.

Yet most scholarship players never receive a pro paycheck. “Cheated” reports that the Chapel Hill swindle went into full swing in 2003, when the school was trying to rebuild its basketball reputation. Since that year, 54 Tar Heels have been drafted by the NFL or NBA. That’s less than a fifth of University of North Carolina football and men’s basketball scholarship holders during the period. And Chapel Hill does better than most: Broadly across NCAA football and men’s basketball, only about 2% of athletic-scholarship recipients are drafted. Because a bachelor’s degree adds about $1 million to lifetime earnings, the diploma is the potential economic reward for the overwhelming majority of college athletes.

Of course, athletes have only themselves to blame for not taking their studies seriously. But many are encouraged by coaches to believe pipe dreams about the pros, to focus all their effort on winning so the coach gets his victory bonus. By the time NCAA athletes realize they’ve been duped, their scholarships are exhausted. Used up and thrown away, they are easily replaced by the next batch of starry-eyed teens who believe their names will be called on draft day.

After the Chapel Hill scandal went public, the school commissioned a flurry of reports, the two most prominent of which appeared to tell all but were at heart whitewashes. The first, overseen by former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin, in 2012 declared “with confidence” that the Tar Heels athletic department knew nothing, nothing: “This was not an athletic scandal,” the report stated. “Sadly, it was clearly an academic scandal; but an isolated one.” Mr. Smith and Ms. Willingham write that in “an amazing display of evasiveness and dishonesty,” Chapel Hill chancellor Holden Thorp pretended that the Martin report concluded the matter. Later Mr. Thorp resigned and floated away to the provost’s post at Washington University in St. Louis. The best-case analysis of Mr. Thorp is that he was hopelessly incompetent; explanations go downhill from there. Yet he paid little professional price. If an NCAA athlete commits a petty violation, he can be thrown out of school. University leaders know that if their schools are caught systematically cheating, a wrist slap will be their fate.

The second report, conducted by a law firm and released in 2014, revealed that the first report was a fairy tale. Though Mr. Thorp denied knowing about the “paper classes,” it concluded that he knew Mr. Nyang’oro’s department “issued higher grades than most other departments and was popular among student-athletes.” Why wasn’t this a red flag? But this document, too, largely exonerated those who commissioned it. Thousands of students got A’s in fake classes. Yet “the higher levels of the university” were guilty only of “a loose, decentralized approach to management” that prevented “meaningful oversight,” even though the existence of “easy-grading classes with little rigor” was widely known.

The second report attached no blame to basketball coach Williams, the most marketable figure in Chapel Hill athletics, reporting his insistence that he “constantly preaches that [the] number one responsibility [of] coaches and counselors is to make sure their players get a good education.” The men’s basketball program has seven coaches for a roster that averages 16—the kind of instructor-to-student ratio normally found only in doctoral programs. Yet we’re asked to believe there’s no way the coaches could have noticed that many players never seemed to need to be in class. Mr. Williams should have been fired for presiding over an institutionally corrupt program. Instead he was given a pass.

Cheating may have gone over the top at Chapel Hill, but in collegiate sports, institutional corruption is a norm. The NCAA works assiduously to change the subject from football and men’s basketball graduation rates, a straightforward measure that anyone can understand. Instead it offers Academic Progress Rate, a hocus-pocus metric seemingly designed to be incomprehensible.

Currently the overall APR of big-college sports is 976 out of 1000. That sounds as if everyone’s nearly perfect. But on this scale, perfection is achieved if all players have at least a 2.0 GPA. Since the average GPA at public universities is 3.0, what the NCAA touts as “academic progress” may equate to significantly below-average outcomes in the classroom.

But the APR shifts the spotlight from actual grades. Last fall, Louisville announced to fanfare that football coach Bobby Petrino will receive a $500,000 bonus for his players’ academic performance. Sound enlightened? The bonus is triggered by the team hitting a 935 APR. Since the average for NCAA football programs is 951, academic excellence at Louisville is now defined down to below average.

Cynicism regarding athletics and education pervades the big-college system. The networks that are “broadcast partners” (their term) with the NCAA—ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Turner—have a financial stake in college sports income and so steer clear of issues like grades and graduation rates.

Nobody much seems to care so long as money flows. Steven Spielberg is a member of the board of trustees at USC, where the graduation rate for African-American men’s basketball players is 25% and 38% for African-American football players. The reason these numbers are terrible isn’t that athletes are departing early for the pros—in the past decade, more than two-thirds of USC football and men’s basketball players were not drafted. The numbers are terrible because players are used for revenue without receiving educations. Mr. Spielberg has made two powerful movies depicting the historical exploitation of African-Americans, “The Color Purple” and “Amistad.” Where is his movie about present-day exploitation of African-Americans in college athletics? He need only look out the window at USC. Or he could buy the rights to “Cheated.”

—Mr. Easterbrook, a contributing editor to the Atlantic, is author of nine books, most recently “The King of Sports.”