Dive Brief:
- During an interview with ESPN, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill whistleblower Mary Willingham, who tutored and advised student athletes at the school for a decade, revealed a 146-word "essay" that earned one athlete an A-.
- Aside from being incredibly short, the paper, written about Rosa Parks, is filled with grammatical errors.
- According to the ESPN segment, athletes at the university were advised to enroll in "paper classes," independent studies with next to no work that were designed to boost functionally illiterate athletes' GPAs so they could remain eligible for play.
Dive Insight:
This is the latest event in the UNC fake-course scandal, which, in case you missed it, involved over 50 African studies courses over five years showing little evidence of ever meeting — and 45% of the students enrolled were athletes.
"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," begins the essay in question, which comes just a few days after a National Labor Relations Board ruling that football players at Northwestern University are employees and can unionize. You really can't feel bad for the athletes here — they're just taking advantage of an opportunity to reach a better place in society in the best way they know how. The universities, however, are gaining money and prestige from their hard work in the meantime while painting them as students. It's not hard to see who's fumbling the ball here, and UNC is likely far from the only culprit.