Editorial: End academic deceit

WRAL-TV, a news station in the Raleigh, N.C., area, reported in an article that a legal decision has not yet been made in a controversy involving student-athletes enrolled in courses offered by the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies. A professor and the administrator have been accused of improperly changing grades and, perhaps most bizarrely, giving grades to students in classes where students and professors rarely met for class.

The department has been under scrutiny since 2010, when a former Tar Heels football player, Michael McAdoo, had to sit out of the 2010 football season because of charges of plagiarism on a course paper in the African and Afro-American studies department.

Throughout the course of the investigation, administrators have been performing random course inspections to make sure that the classes are actually meeting. Some departments are apparently even considering taking pictures of their classes to prove that they are meeting. Records show that student-athletes have comprised 45 percent of registration in the “bogus” classes.

There is an unfortunate — but not necessarily surprising — correlation between student-athletes and classes that don’t meet academic standards. Academic scandals involving athletes are not unique to the University of North Carolina. Many of the students involved in Harvard’s take-home exam cheating scandal last May were athletes.

While many students involved in this type of situation are not athletes — and many athletes do maintain high academic standards — the correlation between student-athletes and academic misconduct designed to boost grades or keep them playing is too strong to be written off. Within the past few years, there have been several notable cases of student-athletes involved in academic scandals: the Harvard case in 2012, one involving apparent liberal diagnosis and aid for learning disabilities in student-athletes at Florida State University in 2009 and a scandal surrounding alleged tennis players’ plagiarism at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2009.

Perhaps the problem lies in the combination of “student” with “athlete” — primarily when it comes to Division I and II athletes at American universities. Many colleges do make an effort to help athletes with academics by providing tutoring and mandating study hours. Pitt even has an entire academic support center dedicated to helping student-athletes succeed academically, but one must question how a competitive athletic program fits into the goals and needs of universities. Student-athletes dedicate a lot of their college careers to athletics, providing a service that creates revenue, but they’re still expected to perform well in school, whether they came college to receive an education or not. While radical, one solution to this problem could be to cut the cord between large sports programs and universities’ academic programs. Abolishing all programs in the Division I and Division II brackets — and making them purely professional school-affiliated sports programs instead — would better maintain academic integrity. Doing away with athletic scholarships and instead having more academic scholarships could help colleges return to their original purpose. On a less radical note, many student-athletes are invested in their educations. Many will not become professional athletes and can get the same benefit from a college education that any other student could, so student-athletes should receive academic support.

Also, in most of these academic scandals, it seems that the students are not necessarily to blame — the administrators, professors and coaches who allow improper grade adjustment and even “bogus classes” do a disservice to universities and athletics, as a whole. For this we propose that colleges have greater oversight of academics. For example, at Pitt, only freshmen and athletes receive midterm grades — wouldn’t requiring midterm grades for all students help students and alert administrators to potential fraud? A university-wide class-attendance policy could prevent “bogus classes.”

It is unlikely that this scandal will cause all colleges to shut down their athletic programs — but hopefully it will cause everyone to be more mindful of prevention strategies.