Dive Brief:
- A student-athlete rights group has filed a federal complaint claiming that the University of North Carolina doesn’t provide male student-athletes with the same quality of education that female student-athletes receive.
- In its complaint to the U.S. Office for Civil Rights, the group says that black male athletes were enrolled in so-called paper classes in the university’s Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies.These classes never met, and required only a term paper at the end of the semester.
- The group, called the Student Athletes Human Rights Project, also cites records showing that 18 of 19 students in a 2011 course from the department were football players, and the 19th was a former football player.
Dive Insight:
The beat goes on for the UNC no-show-classes-for-jocks scandal. Reports in 2012 blamed a former department chairman and an administrator for the paper classes and unauthorized grade-changing. Last year, a grand jury indicted the former chairman on charges that he took money for a course he didn’t teach. And last month, a UNC whistleblower, Mary Willingham, revealed the infamous, poorly written 146-word Rosa Parks essay by an athlete at the university. Willingham, a former athletic counselor, also issued a report showing that male student-athletes at UNC took 199 hours of paper courses, compared to 38 hours for female student-athletes.