Public outrage has exploded with the revelation that the University of North Carolina student responsible for this poorly-written, one-paragraph final paper received an A- in the class as part of a long-running scandal involving dozens of students, a fraudulent academic department and duplicitous administrators.
Here is the text of one student’s final paper for an African American studies class:
Rosa Parks: My Story
On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.
The paper–which is little more than an explanatory paragraph–is ungraded, but the student received an A- in the class. There were no other assignments and the class never actually met.
It is now evident that the African American studies department at UNC was a sham. Its dean, Julius Nyang’oro, is facing criminal charges for defrauding the university. (RELATED: ‘WE CHEATED’ — At UNC, whistle-blowers expose a sickening athletic scam)
Also evident: Administrators knew the classes were fake. Still, they signed dozens of student-athletes up for them in order to inflate their GPAs and keep them eligible for sports — in many cases, hiding glaring academic deficiencies that shouldn’t have passed muster in a typical elementary school, to say nothing of college.
The long-running scam to prioritize the basketball and football programs over any semblance of academic integrity was finally denounced by Mary Willingham, a UNC academic advisor, who said she could no longer remain silent. Former UNC student-athletes have corroborated her story.
“It was just a scam, the whole thing,” said Willingham in an interview with ESPN. “It was a joke. It was so obvious. … We cheated.”
Since coming forward with her information, Willingham claims she has been harassed by officials and suffered retaliation.
Jane Shaw, president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education, said the scandal indicts the entire university.
“There has been lot of pressure here… to paint this scandal—which truly never seems to end—as an ‘athletic scandal,’” she told The Daily Caller. “But not all the students were athletes. What tends to be missed is that it is an academic scandal as well, and that is why it strikes at the heart of UNC’s reputation. The question that is rarely asked by the news media is, how could a department in the College of Arts and Sciences have had no-show classes for 13 years without anyone in the college being aware of it? Where was the dean? The provost?”
The scandal is evidence of misplaced priorities at UNC, and possibly other campuses, said Shaw.
“UNC-Chapel Hill’s priorities have been misguided,” she said. “Some students—both athletes and those taking the AFAM courses—have been poorly served. How different UNC is from other schools that claim to have both quality academics and strong athletic departments I do not know. But certainly UNC got caught. And it has not figured out how to put the crisis behind it.”