TODAY STONE WALLS has an interview with Andy Thomason, author of the new book Discredited about UNC’s athletics/academic scandal of last decade, commonly referred to as “paper classes.” Thomason is assistant managing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, a UNC alum, and a former editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel.
Discredited: The UNC Scandal and College Athletics’ Amateur Ideal dropped this week and you can order it direct from the University of Michigan Press, Flyleaf Books, or Amazon. It’s also available on Kindle. The publisher’s description reads:
In 2009, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was on top of the world.
Consistently named one of the top universities in the country, it had welcomed a new phenom of a chancellor who promised to lead the public Ivy into the future. In the all-important athletic realm, the Tar Heels were the Coca-Cola of athletic brands. Resting upon the legacy of legendary basketball coach Dean Smith, UNC had carved out a reputation of excellence paired with squeaky-clean adherence to the rules. Supporters had a name for that irresistible ethos: the Carolina Way. The Tar Heels were climbing even higher. That year, they won their fifth national championship in men’s basketball and looked poised to climb the ranks in football under a new, high-powered coach.
But within just a few years, it all came crashing down.
The Tar Heels’ success, it turned out, was based on a foundation of deceit. Athletes were flocking to a slate of fake classes that advisers deftly used to keep them eligible to play. That revelation and others metastasized into one of the most damaging scandals ever to visit an American college. In Discredited, journalist Andy Thomason provides a gripping and authoritative retelling of the scandal through the eyes of four of its key participants: the secretary who presided over the fake classes, the professor who directed players toward them, the literacy specialist turned whistleblower who sought to expose the system, and the chancellor who found his career suddenly on the line. The heart-stopping narrative reveals the toll of a college’s investment in major sports, and the amateurism myth upon which it is based. Based on dozens of original interviews and thousands of pages of documents, Discredited demonstrates just how far a university will go to preserve the athletic status quo: tolerating tarnished careers, ruined reputations, and years of scathing media criticism—all for a shot at competitive glory.
Adapted excerpts have appeared in The Chronicle and The Assembly. Thomason’s Chronicle essay, published amid the Nikole Hannah-Jones saga this summer, especially caught my attention because it dove headfirst into some widely overlooked racist aspects to the athletics scandal that entangled the African and Afro-American Studies department and predominantly Black athletes in high-revenue sports. (Free registration is required to read The Chronicle essay.)
Thomason wrote:
The most thorough investigation of the classes would later conclude that knowledge of them inside the [AFAM] department had been limited to a secretary, the department chair, and perhaps one or two others. But back in 2012, a laser beam of suspicion settled on … the roughly two dozen other professors in the department, which has since been renamed. Whiffs of impropriety gave people the opening they needed to say exactly what they thought about Black studies. Letters flowed into the local newspapers, casting aspersions on the department’s integrity. “‘Black studies’ are nothing more than a politically correct sop by our institutions of higher learning to a preferred minority group,” one resident wrote in a letter to The News & Observer, in Raleigh.
One student suggested to The Daily Tar Heel — the student newspaper, which I edited at the time and which published its fair share of sensationalistic coverage — that the entire department should be eliminated. “The actions of a single department have brought shame and embarrassment onto the entire UNC community,” he wrote. A member of the Board of Governors, which oversees the university system, floated the idea of shutting down the department.
A lack of evidence about widespread wrongdoing in the department didn’t stop the generalizations and accusations.
Thomason wrote that the “department’s reputation was unjustly stained” and the “root cause of the scandal was the contortions that so-called amateurism in big-time sports inflicts on campus like UNC.”
Thomason continued:
The collateral damage suffered by the department’s scholars was among the most lasting and shameful consequences of the scandal. It also revealed the extent to which Black scholarship still was not valued nearly half a century after the creation of the department. Had the irregular classes been found in … [the] physics department, would letter writers and board members have called for its elimination? Would newspapers have allowed public conversation to center on the discipline’s validity? Of course not.
Any institution’s priorities can be ascertained by whom it chooses to side with when the ship starts taking on water. Black scholars under siege or the shiny athletic brand? Black student activists or a Confederate statue? A qualified Black journalist seeking tenure or those who despise her work?
Below is the Stone Walls interview with Thomason, conducted via email.
Q&A with Andy Thomason, author of Discredited: The UNC Scandal and College Athletics' Amateur Ideal
MIKE OGLE for STONE WALLS: When were you a student and Daily Tar Heel journalist at UNC, and how did your experiences then inform your work on this book?
I was a student at UNC from 2009 to 2013, and worked at the Daily Tar Heel for all of that time, including as the editor-in-chief in 2012-13. I wouldn't have been able to write this book without my experiences at the DTH. Yes, my familiarity with the people, events, and issues helped — but it was those years of frustration at the university’s reluctance to deal with the root causes of the scandal that fueled my interest in the topic. Not to mention that almost all of my formative training as a journalist came at the DTH.
What made you believe this episode at UNC was worth revisiting in book length several years later? Is the public’s perception and memory of what took place in need of recalibration?
The public conversation during the scandal came to center around who was to blame. To focus on individuals — while logical and helpful in a short-term news context — also obscured the root causes of the scandal. I’d heard lots of talk about masterminds and mistakes, but very little about institutional forces that may have made the university vulnerable to this sort of thing.
Speaking of individuals, one thing that struck me about the scandal is that many of the people closest to the wrongdoing appeared so sympathetic. Figures like Debby Crowder, Jan Boxill, and Julius Nyang’oro had sterling campus reputations before the revelations hit. Were they really the villains in this story? Or did complex contradictions at the center of university life take good people and twist them into doing things they wouldn’t have done otherwise? This was the piece that I thought my book could explore.
Your adapted essay for The Chronicle emphasizes that the academic irregularities were rather isolated. Your book also goes into the history of the AFAM department and its service mission. Could you explain a little of that history and mission, and their relationship to the scandal?
The department was born, first as a curriculum, in direct response to demands from UNC students in the late ’60s. The administration was very reluctant to grant the demand, but ultimately relented in the face of concerted activism. In the ensuing decades, professors in the AFAM curriculum (an entity with less authority than a department) and its supporters agitated for it to be treated as a welcome part of the university’s academic offerings. This meant fights for more funding, faculty hires, and an end to the perception that Black studies was not a serious discipline. Key to this effort was the push for the curriculum to be granted departmental status.
One of the curriculum’s best arguments for departmental status was its focus on serving students. After the university added a non-Western history requirement for students in the ’80s, enrollment in the curriculum’s classes soared. And yet professors and staff in the unit had to meet this demand on a shoestring budget, still having to mostly draw their professors from other departments. This was not tenable, and the curriculum succeeded in petitioning for departmental status in the ’90s.
But this student-service identity didn’t leave the program when it became a department. Embodying this spirit was Debby Crowder, the longtime department manager. Before she became a vilified figure, Crowder had a reputation as a force of almost superhuman beneficence. I came across countless emails of praise for her work helping distressed students who came into her office seeking help. People who knew Crowder pre-scandal spoke of the same quality: When you brought a problem to her, it was her problem, too. One professor, who otherwise spoke highly of her, said he sometimes grated at the fact that “it seemed like everybody she had to save, she had to save through our department.”
So when an academic adviser in Steele Building called Crowder one day with a request to have Julius Nyang’oro, the chair, supervise an independent-study class that would also fill a key perspective requirement — usually something that only lecture courses could do — she made it happen. This eventually snow-balled into the infamous phantom courses we know today.
Had the academic-support program for athletes never recognized the utility of the classes, it’s likely that no one outside some grateful students would have ever found out about them. And if they did, it’s likely no one would have cared. Because the classes came to be used to keep athletes eligible — papering over the contradictions of the amateur myth — they fueled a scandal.
As I wrote in my Chronicle essay, knowledge of the classes was limited to just a few people in the department. And yet it was the scholars in this perennially under-appreciated unit that bore much of the knee-jerk blame for the scandal, even as the phantom classes were just a symptom of a much larger issue.
Your adapted essay connected the athletics scandal to the recent Nikole Hannah-Jones saga. How is it that leaders at UNC, an institution of higher learning, still seem to get caught so flat-footed and uneducated after many years of high-profile scandals revolving around race?
In short, it’s geography, it’s politics, and it’s organizational structure. The first two are self-explanatory — UNC is and has always been a Southern institution at the mercy of the region’s political winds — but it’s the third I’m most interested in.
Take the last two UNC chancellors: Carol Folt and Kevin Guskiewicz. Both have found themselves embroiled in controversies related to race, and both have found themselves hamstrung in how they could respond. Folt made it plain that she did not want Silent Sam on campus, but that the state’s objects-of-remembrance law prevented her from ordering it be taken down. Not only that, but the Board of Governors would have thrown a fit. Folt found herself trapped by this issue even after activists tore down the main part of the statue. So she ordered that the base of the statue be removed and resigned rather than be fired by the Board of Governors.
Guskiewicz found himself confronting a similar issue. He would have been all too happy to have Hannah-Jones approved through the campus’s typical processes. But, encountering resistance from his board and one of the university’s most important donors, the calculus changed and he settled for less. When that decision entered the cauldron of public opinion, it sparked a firestorm of controversy.
The conservative takeover of the legislature has made the job of UNC chancellor much harder. But the chancellor also has to be perpetually cognizant of the feelings of trustees, donors, faculty members, students, and members of the media. It’s a lot of constituencies to please for any leader. Holden Thorp, the chancellor at the time of the academic-fraud scandal, later observed that the act of leading by consensus was futile in such a situation: “What happens is that there comes a time when you have to stop trying to figure out how to bring everybody together and put your shoulders up and say ‘I’m the chancellor of the University, and this is what we’re going to do,’ and then deal with the consequences,” he told the DTH.
People have been pointing to the incompatible dichotomy of big-revenue college sports for decades. The business of college football and basketball seems so huge now, it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever turn back. Is course correction possible in the near term? Does the newfound ability of athletes to earn money off their own name, image, and likeness make a difference?
There are two separate questions to consider here. Let’s call them The Two Problems of Intercollegiate Athletics (of course, this is an oversimplification). The first, which has been ascendant in recent years, is: Are big-time college athletes being financially exploited by the NCAA? America — by which I mean politicians of both parties, regular people, fans, academics, and Supreme Court justices — largely says yes.
This consensus has driven the reforms we’ve seen most recently. The name-image-likeness laws represent one of the largest reforms to visit college sports in decades. And they will correct some of the grossest examples of exploitation that we see. This growing feeling of injustice has also prompted the NCAA to begin rewriting its constitution, a process that may mean ceding more authority to individual conferences, which could mean more economic freedom for big-time athletes.
However, let’s look at problem #2, which is: Does investment in commercial athletics corrupt or otherwise harm the campuses, like UNC, that participate? This used to be a more popular focus of reformers. (Read this excellent article from Sportico for more.) [NOTE: That article is behind a paywall.] I found in my reporting and research that the myth of the student-athlete, propagated by the NCAA, was the core cause of the UNC scandal. To put it too simply, the NCAA’s prohibition on paying athletes outside the value of a scholarship has long depended on the “student-athlete” notion, which has led to all kinds of academic rules that themselves serve to further obscure the degree to which big-time athletes are professionals whose wages are unfairly fixed. The hoops people jump through to satisfy those rules ultimately look ridiculous when they’re revealed in detail, as they were at UNC.
The reforms of problem #1 could help to alleviate problem #2. For instance, let’s say hypothetically that the NCAA were to grant greater authority to the Power 5 conferences, which allowed them to relax both rigid academic rules and limits on athlete pay. That would be a course correction, but it’s too early to tell whether it’s plausible.
The fact that I am white is always on my mind as I think and write about race and racism, as far as interrogating my viewpoints and how to listen and think beyond my own experiences. Was being a white man a challenge you thought about when tackling this topic? Did your thinking evolve? Did you have ways of checking against potential blind spots?
Yes, it was a huge challenge, and one I didn’t fully appreciate when I set out on this project. The act of reporting gave me a firsthand view of how fully my own privilege had blinded me and resulted in harm to others.
In conducting interviews and reviewing the many emails UNC released as part of the Wainstein investigation, I came to understand how damaging unfair media portrayals of the AFAM department as rife with scandal had been to the professors there. The DTH, which I led at the time, was one of the publications that advanced such a portrayal, through letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and also the framing of news articles. In this way I discovered that I had been at the very least complicit in a narrative that gained no small portion of its legibility from racist stereotypes of Black studies as an unserious field.
This realization, of course, did nothing to correct the harmful misconceptions that I helped enable. That damage was done. But it did motivate me, for one, to try to at least partially correct the record through this book. It’s hardly a complete recompense, but I do think that speaking honestly and inviting engagement can be a first step.
ONE GOOD THING:
More than a month after ordering this custom jersey, it finally arrived. Stone Walls wishes Professor Hannah-Jones the absolute best at Howard. Many of us in Chapel Hill still have her back.