Here’s a couple of items out of Chapel Hill to check out before the Wake game later today.
The faculty at UNC-Cheat (other than Jay Smith) is finally starting to make some noise about all the shenanigans in the athletic department.
In a letter to the editor at The Daily Tar Heel, Jack Halperin, a 23 year athletic academic tutor, has resigned over the P.J. Hairston situation.
TO THE EDITOR:
Roy, after 23 years as an academic tutor, and after going through the devastating football scandal, I am resigning in protest of your disgraceful decision to allow P.J. Hairston to remain on the team.
If I were arrested driving with no license, illegal drugs and a gun in a felon’s car, my employment at this University would end immediately.
Hairston’s DTH headline quote was, “I will play this season.†Since when does the criminal decide his fate?
Jack Halperin
Athletic academic tutor
There is also an N&O article where the faculty is starting to ask some questions and sharing information.
This fall, UNC-Chapel Hill enrolled 160 new student athletes, and 14 of them had a predicted grade point average of below a “C,†placing them at risk for academic trouble.
That’s according to Steve Farmer, the undergraduate admissions director, who shared his data with faculty Friday during a wide-ranging discussion of athletics.
Coaches might vet some 400 prospective student-athletes, Farmer said, and 160 with special talent make the cut. Of the 14 in the lowest predicted GPA group, nine are from the revenue sports of basketball and football, Farmer said.
He and his faculty colleagues put forth a number of penetrating questions on admissions standards, freshman eligibility, the number of hours athletes devote to their sport, and why basketball star P.J. Hairston will play for the Tar Heels this season after his much-publicized legal troubles.
The questions emerged at an hourlong faculty debate about how to balance big-time sports at a university where trouble has included improper benefits for athletes, no-show classes in the African and African-American Studies department, criminal investigations and an accreditation scare.
And in a related story, some followup from N&O editor John Drescher about the Martin Report:
I wrote last month about former Gov. Jim Martin’s investigation into academic misconduct at UNC-Chapel Hill. He was assisted by a team from the Baker Tilly auditing firm.
I noted that Martin and Baker Tilly apparently had missed important evidence – emails between Julius Nyang’oro, the former UNC African studies chairman at the heart of the academic scandal, and the program that tutored athletes. Those emails, the substance of which was reported by The N&O in June, showed an inappropriate relationship.
I wasn’t able to reach Martin until after the column was published. In an email, Martin said he had not read the Nyang’oro emails. “I do not know whether anyone at Baker Tilly read them but assume they would have called them to my attention if they had read them,†Martin wrote.
Martin said if he had known about the emails, he would have reported the substance of their content. “I and the Baker Tilly people read and digested what we considered an enormous amount of material but always knew there might be additional items that eluded us,†Martin said.
