If you're an alum of the University of North Carolina, these past couple days may have been the coup de grâce after several years of gut punches from the ongoing academic scandal, having our alma mater's name tarnished and dragged through the mud on national media outlets and through the bowels of fan message boards of the ABC'ers.
It's hard to put in words how to feel. Is it shame, embarrassment, defiance, denial? Some are saying our degrees are devalued, the entire sports program should be shut down, and the school itself needs to lose its grants and funding for the fraud it perpetrated. I don't think thats the proper remedy, but when the media gets a juicy story, when the frothing public has their new target of outrage, the waters won't stop churning until a proper sacrifice is made.
Lets get this out there first. This academic impropriety is shameful, and we should be embarrassed. There is no proper defense for the scheme, no amount of bargaining or reasoning to make it acceptable. It just isn't. But there have been a couple points that keep jabbing at my side every time an outsider wants to throw stones and look down at my education, my hard earned degrees.
First, two wrongs don't make a right, so I am not trying to justify the actions of an academic department's secret school system. But before all these alum's of other schools, with their own high powered "student athletes," get on their pedestals with a holier than thou demeanor, I'd just caution that you may not have as strong a foundation to stand on as you think.
Lets be honest with ourselves - athletes have been getting perks and benefits in high schools and colleges all across the country since the first dollar was earned showcasing a sporting event. Just as beautiful women may find it easier to get out of traffic tickets, or that the spawn of the rich and powerful may escape serious legal troubles with nothing more than a timeout (and maybe no dessert), with a lucrative job awaiting them after graduation, so too have athletes been given an easy academic ride.
They get into easier classes, with more sympathetic teachers. They get graded lighter. Tutors can help them "write" papers, or get answer keys from old exams, or any other numerous ways to keep their grades eligible. Admit it, you know of special classes at your school that were easy A's, with a majority of athletes enrolled in them. You know of the easy majors that don't require much work. This is nothing groundbreaking.
Don't get me wrong, not all athletes are dumb, and many have become very successful in jobs outside of sports. But are we really going to pretend that all of Alabama's football scholars are able to put in their work on the field to win national titles, and then crank out their Calculus, Econ, Biology, History, and World Literature homework? How about the new darlings at Mississippi and Mississippi State, or LSU, or Florida State, or at the one and done factory in Kentucky? And we all know of some athletes who have slid by under the radar, having been able to get by without even a high school equivalent writing and reading comprehension level. How do they stay eligible at these big time programs without any extra help?
In fact, the acceptance standards for athletes at many of these schools would be considered academic fraud at Carolina. Many athletes deemed ineligible for acceptance into Carolina's program somehow found a way to be eligible at another school, without changing a thing. How is this an equitable principle, where some schools can get certain athletes who have tons of brawn power solely based on lowering their academic standards? So we can just turn a blind eye and say, "hey, they didn't cheat because they weren't required to achieve the same level grades?"
Now, I realize not every school resorts to such methods of athlete "assistance," and the program within UNC's AFAM department may very well be the most deplorable of all. It could never happen to your school, or at "so-and-so" school, right? But, hey, it never could have happened at Carolina either, until it was actually uncovered after years of investigation. Who's to say that Stanford's and Notre Dame's highly successful football programs are solely because they found the perfect formula for finding brilliant scholar athletes, without their own shadow program? I bet none of their AD's are willing to look too deep to find out. As they say, ignorance is bliss.
My second issue of contention is how I should suddenly question the degree I attained, that anything earned at Carolina now has no worth or meaning, and should be lit on fire.
Nonsense.
For the rest of us regular students, Chapel Hill offers a very tough curriculum in a variety of fields, and they excel in the majority of them on a nationwide level. UNC's journalism school is world-renowned, its Public Health school ranked at the top, its medical and law schools highly regarded across the country, as well as its business, education, social work, and pharmacy schools. Even getting into the school is highly competitive, with no tutoring or special classes to help you get in.
Sure, 3,100 students over a period of 2 decades took a no show class, which is a high number. But a bigger number is the 30,000 total students and 20,000 undergraduates who attend on a yearly basis. Lets say there are 5,000 new students per year; thats close to 100,000 students (minus the 3,100) who busted their asses everyday over 2 decades who never took, or even heard of these independent study classes. While there may have been a dozen or so faculty members who were involved in the miseducation of Chapel Hill, there are 8,000 other staff members who comprise the award winning and highly respected institution, who did uphold the core values of the University.
So no, the actions of a small group people who I didn't even know existed while I was on campus does not degrade my accomplishments in the slightest. After all, if one of your family members committed a crime, does that suddenly taint your own accomplishments? Of course not. What you did stands on its own. You still love your misguided brethren, and understand that there will be a backlash. But I will never be sorry for what I achieved on my own, and I value my education just as much now as I did when I graduated all those years back.
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