“Beyond those university personnel who were aware of red flags,” Wainstein wrote, “there were a large number among the Chapel Hill faculty, deans and athletics personnel, who knew<br />that there were easy-grading classes with little rigor.”<br />“Little rigor” is a term of art that begs for definition.<br />A historian, Jay Smith, has written a book, “Cheated,” on this case,<br />and recently taught a class: “Big-Time College Sports and the Rights of Athletes, 1956 to the Present.” Students loved it; his classroom was filled.<br />Student athletes, particularly those from the “revenue sports” — basketball<br />and football — were steered to these poor or nonexistent courses, and in some cases, they were told they could sleep in class.<br />Put simply, for two decades until 2013, the university provided fake classes for<br />many hundreds of student athletes, most of them basketball and football players.<br />The chairman of the Board of Governors wrote in an email<br />that he had repeatedly asked administrators to purge people who were involved in “fake classes.”<br />“Their inability to answer this basic question undermines their credibility,” he wrote.<br />And Rashad McCants, a former player on the Tar Heels’ basketball team, said that tutors regularly wrote papers for students.
