An advocacy group for college athletes alleges in a federal complaint that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discriminated against male athletes, particularly black male athletes, by shuttling them into “no show” courses that required only a term paper at the end of the semester and that were the basis of an academic-fraud scandal that has hit the university in recent years, The Herald-Sun, a newspaper in Durham, N.C., reported.
In the complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the group, the Student Athletes Human Rights Project, cites records indicating that 18 of 19 students enrolled in one such course in 2011 were active football players, and the other was a former football player. It also cites a report by Mary C. Willingham, a learning specialist who has worked in the athletics department at Chapel Hill, showing that male athletes took 199 hours of paper-only courses, compared with 38 hours for female athletes.
“This disparity is an indicator that male UNC student-athletes are not provided with the same educational opportunities, including quality of education, as female student-athletes,” The Herald-Sun quotes the complaint as stating. “Further, this information suggests that male UNC student athletes are not provided with the same treatment and services, including course advising, as female UNC student-athletes.”
A university spokeswoman, Karen Moon, told the newspaper that the university had not received any information from the Office for Civil Rights regarding such a complaint and would not comment.
The academic-fraud scandal has led to several investigations at Chapel Hill, and the university announced in February that it was hiring an independent lawyer to conduct another inquiry that would “follow the facts where ever they might lead.”
