Wow, I can't get over these excerpts from this article:
"As it would turn out, the class was fake, one of 186 bogus classes created by a clerical employee and avid Tar Heel basketball fan named Deborah Crowder. There was no professor. She enrolled seven students, six of them athletes, including four football players and one men’s basketball player, just before she retired.
As in the other 185 classes, those enrolled had only to produce a paper that would get an automatic high grade. Crowder signed professors’ names – including Mutima’s – on the rolls. She often didn’t read the papers."
"The findings were so shocking they made network newscasts: 18 years of fake classes that had no instruction, automatic high marks for papers “graded” by Crowder, a scheme born to help maintain the eligibility of athletes in major revenue sports. Her boss, department chairman Nyang’oro, created three more bogus classes after Crowder retired in 2009."
"Two years before Nancy Davis’ message to Hargrove that the bogus classes didn’t appear to involve athletes’ eligibility, Crowder’s impending retirement had left academic counselors for football players near panic.
In the summer of 2009, a counselor urged in all-caps language that all football players should get their papers in on time so that they would be graded by Crowder before she left. That fall, two members of the counseling staff created a PowerPoint for the football coaches to drive home the point that the “paper” classes were no longer available to help players stay eligible.
The presentation explained the nature of the players’ classes:
“They didn’t go to class...They didn’t take notes, have to stay awake...They didn’t have to meet with professors...They didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material.”
Read more here:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/special...rylink=cpy
