Cheated by Jay M. Smith & Mary Willingham

Author:Jay M. Smith & Mary Willingham [Smith, Jay M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO061000 Sports & Recreation / Coaching / General
ISBN: 9781612347479
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2015-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

2.3

15

1.64

2.3

18

1.56

2.9

13

2.15

2.6

14

2.14

2.6

12

1.93

2.3

14

1.54

2.3

9

1.90

2.2

6

2.04

1.9

6

1.72

2.1

9

1.82

2.1

7

1.73

1.6

12

0.90

2.2

4

1.98

2.2

5

2.03

2.6

5

2.49

2.5

3

2.38

2.4

11

2.02

2

10

1.68

1.9

8

1.51

Sample of paper-class impact on GPA.

Martin thus consistently put an athletics-friendly spin on the evidence, and when he had no evidence available, he made things up. Having failed, like everyone before him, to squeeze a single word out of either Julius Nyang’oro or Debby Crowder, Martin was reduced to sheer speculation in his attempt to account even tentatively for the motives of the two AFRI/AFAM leaders. A wholly uninformed observer familiar only with the broad outlines of the case might have offered several hypotheses. Maybe the two had enjoyed the familiarity, the intimacy, with athletes that their favoritism afforded them? Maybe they looked for ways to be “helpful” to all “needy” students, among whom athletes always figured disproportionately? Or perhaps they had been given various inducements from people in or around the UNC athletic program (or other campus programs, since this apparently was not an athletics story at all)?

Martin ignored or discounted all of these possible explanations. He even consigned to a chart near the end of the report the news that Debby Crowder had received a bequest of one hundred thousand dollars from the family of the late basketball counselor Burgess McSwain in 2008, a detail that suggested “nothing inappropriate” to Martin’s team—though it clearly did suggest an unusually close relationship between two of the three key originators of the academic double-standard system.22 (Martin had clearly gotten the message that Crowder was no booster with “extremely close ties” to the Athletic Department; Crowder’s and Nyang’oro’s status as gung-ho UNC sports fans went unmentioned in his seventy-four page report.) Consistent with the overall tenor of his report, Martin sought to account for motive by inventing an alternative explanation that had literally nothing to do with athletics. “We noted the possibility,” Martin said, “that an emerging department would be motivated to increase its enrollment.”23 Julius Nyang’oro, in other words, had perhaps devised this grand and fraudulent scheme in order to make AFRI/AFAM look like a department with robust enrollment figures.

Here the governor seemed to be grasping at straws. The AFRI/AFAM Department had long been considered an enrollment “success story” in the College of Arts and Sciences, and its enrollments had remained healthy throughout the Nyang’oro era. AFRI/AFAM had become a department in 1997 largely because of its enrollment figures, not in spite of them. And Martin’s own numbers offered scant support for the idea that Nyang’oro had sought and found a surefire technique to make AFRI/AFAM look like an enrollment driver in the college. The Martin and Baker-Tilly figures showed that at the end of an eight-year period that preceded the introduction of the university’s new general education curriculum in 2006, annual enrollments in AFRI/AFAM had grown 13.6 percent. By contrast, in all other departments of the College of Arts and Sciences over that same eight-year period, annual enrollments had increased 13 percent.24 The enrollment increase in AFRI/AFAM, in other words, was consistent with the overall increase in the size of the UNC student body beginning in the late 1990s. Nyang’oro

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