ND doesn’t receive favoritism from the NCAA or media. ESPN treats them like crap because they aren’t part of the ESPN package. And the NCAA has screwed ND over for actually following the rules, unlike UNC who made up fake classes for athletes...
None of us will have patience for anyone repeating what are NCSU talking points and are far more fantasy than anything else.
I'll give you the quick overview, and if it interests you can delve deeply.
UNC's AFAM's first secretary, Debbie Crowder, was a quite neurotic female who struggled a bit as a UNC student. She was decidedly Feminist, in the sense of Elite academic institutions. We will never know (because both she and the Department Chair Julius Nyang'oro refused to testify under oath or even cooperate beyond the minimal) who developed the basic idea, but AFAM began to position itself as the go-to department for easy grades. Crowder we know had written many several times about the need for women and minority students to have access to classes that would not make them feel like they did not belong because the work might seem overwhelming.
Very early when it became a Department (as opposed to inter-disciplinary studies), AFAM was recognized by students as giving A and B grades like candy. I warned on online about AFAM having extremely inflated grades no later than 2005 - I'd been tipped off by another alum who had a daughter then at UNC, and my friend knew that I knew first hand about a similar problem at another university. That grade inflation meant that many students wanted AFAM classes for General Studies requirements. That led to Julius and Debbie designing a bunch of independent study classes, so that all the students who wanted those Easy A AFAM general studies classes could get them.
Athletes will hear about Easy A classes and departments no later than other students. And they too will rush to get them, to pad their GPAs. And athletes, at almost any school (even non-scholarship schools) get to pick classes first, because of their travel schedules. That means that athletes always will get their fair share of Easy A classes. Matt Doherty astutely summed it by saying that water always finds the easiest route to flow.
Those classes were never designed for athletes. They were designed to draw students, all kinds of students, to take AFAM classes. Debbie wanted as many of them as could be scheduled because her particular feminist vision meant she saw them as striking at white patriarchy. Julius wanted them because the more students a department has, the more money it gets, to hire new professors and graduate student teachers. It was a perfect storm of academic-PC and old fashioned greed making each other blind to consequences and morality. And the UNC tradition of
hands off for departments (The Dean of Arts&Sciences simply would never have dared question any department head about the legitimacy of any courses he approved) meant that it could go on for decades if none of the AFAM profs talked and none of the students complained bout the Easy As.
But Debbie herself was increasingly bothered, precisely because she felt that the Easy As were not be going only to the people she wanted them to go to. So in a couple of writings (perhaps all of them emails) she noted that the growth in the AFAM independent study classes might have negative consequences. In one of those, she specifically complained about the large number of 'frat boys' taking the classes.
Debbie was a neurotic dunderhead, and she might have convinced herself she meant SAE and ATO white frat boys, which she hated with a permanent passion. But the 'Greek' problem with taking up spots was about the black frats. I was told that for several years in succession, 100% of the Que-dogs (Omega Psi Phi) would take 1 AFAM class each semester.
Debbie wanted those Easy As to go to 'deserving' people, and black frat boys were much less deserving than 'sensitive' feminists and black guys who were not Que-dogs and not football players.
Debbie adore Dean Smith, and to her, a black basketball player would be much more deserving than a black man playing any other sport.
The sport that had the highest percentage of players who took AFAM Easy A classes was women's basketball. That also is the only sport in which, after about a decade of the growth of the academic scam, coaches seemed to know for sure that AFAM independent study classes were a big con.
If you have trouble understanding how coaches could not know, because the players have tutoring, at UNC, tutoring of athletes is done by A&S - neither the Athletics department nor any sport have ny say about tutoring. And AFAM was a part of A&S.
A&S covered up AFAM, which was an A&S problem. Even the faulty tutoring that was part of the AFAM Easy A mess, was purely on A&S and not at all on the Athletics Department.
When it started coming out, the UNC Chancellor was Holden Thorp, and he decided to make it 100% about sports, almost all of it about football. Before he was Chancellor, Thorp had been Dean of A&S - so in blaming athletics, he was covering his own behind.
The AFAM mess was about PC and about corrupt and weak and cowardly and dissembling academics.
theacc.com
