A Whistle-Blower Spurs Self-Scrutiny in College Sports

Since exposing academic fraud at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mary C. Willingham says she has heard from dozens of tutors and academic advisers describing similar problems on other campuses.

But few of those people have championed her cause, reflecting what some observers see as a culture of fearfulness and defensiveness in big-time athletics.

“It’s really hard to embrace someone when you’re holding your own breath,” says Brian Davis, a former head of academic services for football at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s like, ‘Please, God, don’t let this happen to us.’”

Before she became the focus at Chapel Hill, Ms. Willingham was not well known in the academic-support world. But her crusade—though mired in controversy—has highlighted widespread problems, including a growing academic gap between high-profile athletes and other students, and increasingly sophisticated schemes to maintain player eligibility.

At North Carolina, Ms. Willingham says she worked with some 50 football and basketball players a year who read below a middle-school level. She provided details about hundreds of athletes enrolled in independent-study courses that required little to no work.

Ms. Willingham’s critics have sought to discredit her, arguing that she misinterpreted data about athletes’ reading levels, plagiarized in parts of her own master’s thesis, and embellished the role of the athletic department in steering players toward the bogus classes.

The whistle-blower and her critics appear to be operating on different levels. North Carolina’s administrators seem to think that, by undermining the messenger, they can defend the integrity of the flagship campus. But Ms. Willingham has a bigger target. She sees the university’s problems as a microcosm of a broken educational enterprise that she is intent on fixing.

“We start in kindergarten and we don’t stop,” she said in a recent interview. “We take money and resources away from poor black families. Then we bring these kids to college, and they make money for us without getting a real education.”

Elephant in the Room

Soon after Ms. Willingham’s accusations went public, through a series of articles in The News & Observer, a North Carolina newspaper, many academic advisers posted comments on a popular industry forum, raising questions about how the scandal would be perceived nationally and what other athletic departments could do to prevent similar fallout.

Early this year, several directors of academic support for athletes commented on the increasing prevalence of underprepared athletes and the complicity of academic-support systems. Until Ms. Willingham started talking about such issues, some directors said in the online forum, few people were willing to discuss them publicly.

“College athletics has become a monster of an elephant in the room that has aspects (e.g. academic unpreparedness) which folks—coaches, provosts, admissions, presidents, alumni, even us in academic services—convince themselves don’t exist,” wrote one director, in a post that was shared with The Chronicle. “Who among us, in our tenure in this profession, hasn’t raised an eyebrow how a certain student-athlete got admitted to our institution? Who among us has never had an instance where a coach has ‘impressed’ upon us the need for Johnny or Susie to ‘be eligible?’

“Unless the NCAA is going to seriously ramp up requirements, the elephant will remain in the room, largely invisible,” said the director, who requested anonymity because of the potential for professional reprisal.

While some advisers posted concerns about Ms. Willingham’s methods, her campaign has helped persuade many athletic departments to scrutinize their protections against academic fraud.

Prompted in part by the widening scandal in Chapel Hill, leaders of the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics recently unveiled new guidelines for promoting academic integrity. Their suggestions include dozens of ideas for tightening oversight of nontraditional classes, tutoring sessions, and computer labs.

The document, which the group’s leaders shared with The Chronicle, raises concerns about the proctoring of online exams and assignments, coaches’ involvement in nontraditional courses, and the need for policies that specify how suspicious activity should be reported.

The guidelines also suggest that colleges should create policies specifying appropriate communication among faculty members, coaches, and athletics administrators.

In response to the scandal, administrators at Chapel Hill have adopted a number of safeguards, including requiring professors to submit to regular class checks to ensure that courses are meeting as scheduled. The university has also created learning contracts for independent-study classes and has restructured its academic-support unit.

The UNC scandal has had an impact elsewhere as well. The University of Texas has encouraged its academic advisers to examine the relationships that some professors have with players, says Mr. Davis, who worked at the university for about 16 years before departing last month.

“It made us look at making sure that student-athletes don’t have the opportunity to take advantage of some faculty member’s kindness,” he says. “I don’t know if the industry is there yet, but you can’t just assume that if a faculty member wants to do something, it’s the right thing to do. You have to be the one that controls the moral compass.”

Other universities have devoted more time to training, emphasizing how much help tutors are allowed to give players.

“Half the time, when you have a tutor who does too much, it’s not because anyone has asked them to do it, it’s because they’re nice people,” says one academic-support leader, who asks not to be identified. “They’ll say, ‘He’s really going to struggle with this, so I’m going to help him more.’

“You can convince yourself it’s OK,” this person says. “But you really have to check yourself in those situations.”

Limited Safeguards

Monitoring online classes, which have become increasingly popular with athletes, remains a significant challenge. Many programs have struggled to define how much assistance their academic-support staff can provide for distance learning. And with the rapid growth of such offerings, some institutions have failed to put in place safeguards verifying the identity of the person taking the class.

Athletes who take online classes sometimes have their tests proctored in athletic-department computer labs where others are studying, raising concerns that players might be receiving inappropriate assistance.

In recent months, academic advisers have debated whether test-taking should be allowed in such spaces, and if so, how it should be monitored.

Ursula Gurney, a senior athletic director at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, says the subject came up in April at a regional meeting of academic advisers in Oklahoma City. During a discussion in which she was a panelist, someone suggested that athletes who are taking tests in computer labs should be properly identified.

Ms. Gurney’s university will soon require that a red sign be placed over the computer space of test-takers, signaling to others that they need to be working independently.

“We all need to make sure we’re improving our systems to create a more sound environment,” she says.

The problems at Chapel Hill have reaffirmed her belief that, to prevent fraud, athletic departments must foster more communication between athletics officials and academic officials.

“Whoever is leading the academic effort needs to be engaged with senior administrators so they’re well-versed in what’s going on—how tutoring takes place, the admissions process, who’s eligible,” Ms. Gurney says. “Academics cannot be a silo within the athletic department—it needs to be part of the team, just like strength and conditioning or the training room.”

North Carolina’s troubles have led many people to question how deeply academic-support units should be embedded in athletic departments.

In the late 1990s, after an academic scandal on the men’s basketball team at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, many athletics programs shifted oversight of academic advising to the provost or chief academic officer. For various reasons, including financial challenges at many institutions, the pendulum has started to swing the other way, or has landed somewhere in the middle.

Many advising units now have dual reporting lines, says Kim Durand, associate athletics director for student development at the University of Washington, who is president of the national academic advisers’ group.

“A lot of people get their funding from athletics but have oversight and a connection with campus,” she says. “But is it seen as a no-no or not as favorable or that there’s more potential for fraud when you only report to athletics? I haven’t seen that.”

Critics disagree, saying that, as long as academic advisers continue to take their orders from athletics officials, their ability to speak out about problems will be compromised.

“They have no business answering to an athletic entity—they need to be housed in the academic organization under the provost,” says Gerald Gurney, a former director of academic services for athletes at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s the only thing that will set academic-support professionals free from undue pressure.”

And as important as advisers are in helping to maintain academic integrity, they face other limits. For example, they typically have no say in who is admitted to the university.

If colleges hope to more fully insulate themselves from academic fraud, critics argue, they must adopt tougher admissions standards rather than accept anyone who meets the NCAA’s minimum qualifications.

“College presidents know full well they are admitting unprepared athletes on the pretense of being students,” Mr. Gurney says. “Until they do something to change that, academic fraud is only going to get worse.”

‘In It to Win It’

Ms. Willingham, a former learning specialist, figures that colleges will always accept athletes who are not at the same academic level as their peers, and she has no problem with that. She just wants institutions to do more to support those players so they have a better chance to succeed.

She would like to see the NCAA pay for an extensive remedial-education program for the lowest academic performers, requiring those athletes to sit out games and have limited practice time for the first 15 months they are on campus.

“For me, it all goes back to literacy,” she says. “If you’re not ready to read a college text, then you need to get prepared before you can really pass a class.”

This week Ms. Willingham plans to visit Washington for a meeting of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. It will be her eighth visit to Washington in the past nine months.

During that time, she has met with aides to a half-dozen members of Congress who have taken an increasing interest in overhauling the NCAA. She says she has also adopted a slogan: “I’m ‘in it to win it’—as the NCAA says.”

For her, a victory on the national level would mean that the graduation rates of black men continue to rise, and that more of them begin to read closer to grade level.

She also wants an open, honest conversation about the eligibility of athletes.

“What’s more important?” she asks. “The eligibility, or education and future of these young people?”