Two former athletes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have named the institution in a lawsuit, the second one filed over a long-running scheme of fake classes exposed in full last year, the Raleigh News & Observer reports.
Rashanda McCants, a former women’s basketball player, and Devon Ramsey, a former football player, are represented in the suit by Michael Hausfeld, the lawyer representing a former University of California at Los Angeles basketball star, Ed O’Bannon, in his lawsuit against the NCAA. The new suit, filed on Thursday in the state superior court in Durham, N.C., also names the NCAA.
The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, argues that the NCAA and UNC failed to “safeguard and provide a meaningful education to scholarship athletes who agreed to attend UNC—and take the field—in exchange for academically sound instruction.”
An independent report revealed last year that more than 3,000 students had benefited from a scheme of fake classes in the university’s department of African and Afro-American studies. It found that athletics counselors had steered athletes into the classes to keep them eligible to play.
Just weeks after the report was released, a former Chapel Hill football player, Michael McAdoo, filed a class-action suit over the findings, saying he had been denied a quality education.
