This Doesn’t Sound Good:Wade Hargrove(UNC-CH board chair) says Football class ‘troubling in the extreme’

The chairman of the board of trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill said Sunday that the revelation of a summer class packed last year with football players who received grades without instruction is “troubling in the extreme.”

This is a HOT one, a HOT topic button and you need to read on about this and you’ll have to wonder what is really going on down in Chapel Hill???? Hard to fathom that education could be conducted like this, but please read on and form your own conclusions/opinions…from the News and Observer….(www.newsobserver.com)

Wade Hargrove, chairman since last summer, said the new information about the class raises questions that still need answering.

Among them are documenting how the class was created and how the football players knew to enroll within days after it opened for registration. Eighteen members of the team and one former player enrolled in the class.

Find out and decide for yourself as you CLICK HERE to read all from the News and Observer in Raleigh….

18 thoughts on “This Doesn’t Sound Good:Wade Hargrove(UNC-CH board chair) says Football class ‘troubling in the extreme’

  1. This ball is rolling so fast that even UNC with its unlimited resources and all cannot stop it.
    The chickens are about to come home to roost, UNC. This will not end well for those that adore the light blue.
    They will regret covering up instead of cleaning up. They have so many people that have damning information that they no longer know who to bribe with hush money. Blake,Butch,Jennifer,Dickie,Mrs. Crowder, Dr. Nyang’oro; is Holden next to fall on his sword for dear old UNC?

  2. I’m just saying, receiving grades where there was NO instruction…..This does not look good…..The door to the penalty box looks like it is standing wide-open waiting for somebody to come on in….

    What if you are a mainstream student and not a part of the athletic community and the athletes are getting a free ride in and outside of the classroom…..

    This does not look good, no matter where you attend school now, or where you graduated from….How many of you out there attended classes where you got grades and received NO instruction???

    Something is not right here and it does not look good!

  3. The way this seems to be working the UNC instructor may as well just leave the grade book out and let the students write their own grades in there….Just fill it in with the grade you want…..Being a hard working student and former instructor who spent hours on end trying to do it the right way, this has me very upset….

  4. Don’t forget this is a basketball issue also there were quite a few bb players taking these classes.

  5. New N&O article below…UNC BOT chairman Wade Hargrove is not happy and comments about the academic scandal.

    The chairman of the board of trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill said Sunday that the revelation of a summer class packed last year with football players who received grades without instruction is “troubling in the extreme.”

    Wade Hargrove, chairman since last summer, said the new information about the class raises questions that still need answering.

    Among them are documenting how the class was created and how the football players knew to enroll within days after it opened for registration. Eighteen members of the team and one former player enrolled in the class.

    Link: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/10/2128273/unc-ch-board-chair-football-class.html

    Amazing how those boys found out about that class so fast and not one single non-athlete signed up for the class.

  6. Hobbs Johnson comes close to flunking out and is told to go home but by some miracle he enrolls in 4 classes in the infamous African American Studies program and, wala, instantly he makes 4 A’s to stay eligible. He’s a genious I say, a genuious. Simply an under-achiever.

    By Justin Hite

    Saturday, June 9, 2012
    Share on print Print Share on email E-Mail Share on reddit Reddit More Sharing ServicesMore.

    Ask Hobbs Johnson what drives him, and he can point to two very specific instances. In one, he was an observer.

    In the other, he was more of the reason than a participant.

    Both are tightly connected.

    Johnson, a former pitcher at Rocky Mount High and a current weekend starter for the North Carolina Tar Heels, watched last year as UNC celebrated a super regional victory against Stanford.

    It was the end of Johnson’s freshman year at North Carolina. He wasn’t finding much success in the classroom, and even less on the mound.

    The coaching staff told him he was a liability. He was nearly kicked off the team.

    He was told to go home.

    “At that point, it was a real struggle for me,” Johnson said.

    But instead of going home, a small piece of home came to him. Former Rocky Mount High pitcher Benton Moss joined the Tar Heels.

    The two “brothers” were reunited, just in a shade of blue a little lighter than their alma mater.

    Johnson found his form but not without a few bad outings to start the year, and Moss eventually lived up to his high school All-American status.

    Together, they have become weekend starters for the Tar Heels.

    “We made up our minds that we were going to stay there,” Johnson said. “We weren’t going to have any distractions or let anyone take us out of our role. For me and him, it was like pushing each other the same way we did in high school.”

    Johnson led North Carolina in batting average against and finished the year 7-1 with a 1.56 ERA – second-best on the team. Moss wasn’t far behind with a 7-2 record that he said could have easily been 9-1 after tying for the team-lead with 16 starts.

    “He helped put things in perspective,” Moss said. “I was just a freshman. I got in there, and I was antsy.”

    Both pitchers spent time in middle relief before rejoining the starting rotation and potentially stabilizing the Tar Heels staff for the next two years. They did it with a shared mentality, one that Johnson learned from his struggles.

    “He’s been there. He’s done that,” Moss said. “He helped me get to a this-pitch-only mentality.”

    When Moss started the year, he was always worried about the next game. He was tight and was concerned as much with the season as a whole as the next pitch he was ready to throw.

    Johnson, who needed four As in his summer school classes to remain eligible, knew that worrying about starts or appearances down the road is foolish. He learned from experience that the next start is never guaranteed.

    “It puts things in perspective for me,” Moss said. “When I have a bad outing, it could be a lot worse.”

    Johnson and Moss share a prayer before every game, appreciative for where they are now and thankful for the opportunity to pitch together – because it nearly didn’t happen.

    “We kind of took this year and are pretty much going to consider taking our time at Carolina as a second chance,” Johnson said.

    The two work out and threw every day during the year. They’ll have even more time to do that next year when they move in together along with a few other baseball players.

    When they had bad outings, and before each hit their stride there were a few, it took words from the other to settle the nerves.

    “It meant a lot because it was Hobbs,” Moss said. “He was coming off as being genuine. … He’s a brother of mine. Whenever he’d say something to me, I felt like it had a little more feeling. We’re cut from the same cloth. We are both Rocky Mount boys.”

    Moss and Johnson seemed to do everything at the same time, including finding their form. Johnson pointed to a relief outing against then-No. 21 USC as his “big confidence booster.”

    He pitched 3 2/3 scoreless innings, and despite the fact that the Tar Heels lost, Johnson regained the confidence that he had lost since high school.

    “I could get these hitters out,” Johnson said.

    Three days later, Moss pitched 8 1/3 scoreless innings for his first career victory against Elon University.

    By the time the Atlantic Coast Conference schedule was in full swing, Moss and Johnson were starting back-to-back games on the weekend.

    Moss made Johnson better, on the field and in the classroom. And Johnson helped ease Moss, who is a Morehead scholar, into college baseball.

    “It was comfort more than anything,” Johnson said. “It was almost like a calming thing.”

    Johnson’s struggles will never be far out of his mind.

    He won’t let them escape, because they are his motivation. He might be far from those struggles when time is considered, but he knows they are never far away.

    Moss knows it, too.

    “You’re not going to have your stuff perfectly every time,” Moss said. “You have to take the good times with the bad because they’ll both be there. It’s just how you respond which defines how great you can become – how you respond to the good and the bad. He’s definitely a huge reminder of that.”

    Sounds more like life advice than baseball?advice.

    Maybe it’s both.

  7. just in from ESPN.

    Uh oh, it’s basketball. 23 basketball players confirmed and 246 football players. A player could have taken multiple classes, like Tyler Hansborough did.

    Someone call Fed Ex. unc needs to send back that NCAA basketball trophy.

    MORE ACADEMIC FRAUD INVESTIGATION: In early May, The News & Observer first reported that football and basketball players represented 39 percent of the enrollment in the 54 courses in the Department of African and Afro-American studies in which an internal investigation produced evidence of unauthorized grade changes, and little or no instruction by professors.

    Basketball coach Roy Williams said through team spokesman at that time that he was not concerned that basketball players made up about 3 percent of the students enrolled in those classes, because they were eligible to take those classes, just like any other student, and they did the work assigned to them.

    Saturday, The N&O’s Dan Kane raised new questions about whether Tar Heel athletes — specifically football players — were being steered toward those suspect classes. Wrote Kane:

    A summer class at UNC-Chapel Hill that lacked any instruction was enrolled exclusively with football players – and it landed on the school calendar just days before the semester started, university records show.

    The records show that in the summer of 2011, 19 students enrolled in AFAM 280: Blacks in North Carolina, 18 of them players on the football team, the other a former player. They also show that academic advisers assigned to athletes helped the players enroll in the class, which is the subject of a criminal investigation.

    The advisers also knew that there would be no instruction.

    The newest revelations involved football players, but it’s interesting to take a look at how basketball enrollments break down in each of the 54 classes, as shown by these records released to The N&O.

    Of note: •Two classes — one in a 2007 summer session, the other in a 2008 summer session — show 100 percent basketball enrollment, but each only included one student (as an independent study). The next highest percentage for basketball players in one class was another summer school course in 2008 in which two students were enrolled — a basketball player, and a non-student-athlete.
    •During the 2008-09 national title regular season, there were two basketball enrollments in classes deemed “irregular.” In one class, AFAM 428, there were 36 enrollments in the class (including one basketball player and 21 other student-athletes, total). The other, AFRI 520, included one basketball player and 12 other student athletes. There were 38 total enrollments.
    •One basketball player was also enrolled in an “irregular” 2009 summer school class; eight of nine enrollments in that class were student-athletes. Another basketball player was enrolled in an “aberrant” 2009 summer school class; six of the seven enrollees were student-athletes.
    •In all, there were 23 basketball enrollments, and 246 football enrollments in the suspect classes during the school’s internal review period, which covered summer 2007 through summer 2011. (Note: one player could have enrolled in more than one class, so that doesn’t necessarily mean 23 basketball players were involved).

    Wrote Kane on Saturday:

    Nancy Davis, a spokeswoman for the university, and Jonathan Hartlyn, a senior associate dean who oversees the African studies department and conducted the internal review, continued to stress that non-athletes also took the suspect classes and received the same treatment grade-wise. Records show 42 percent of the enrollments were non-athletes.

    But they also noted the university contacted the NCAA when they became aware of what happened with the summer class. The NCAA has yet to say anything about the academic fraud case.

    UNC chancellor Holden Thorp wrote in a letter to the UNC Board of Trustees that the school is trying to determine how the football-only summer school class in 2011 was created and how the student-athletes were registered for it.

  8. It involved at leat 9 professors although several said they never taught teh class and grades were forged along with their signatures. No wonder the SBI is involved.

    For years Peppers and LT bragged about how thye di not attend a class their last 2 years. many wondered how they stayed eligible. now we know.

    What is troubling is not only did it involve football, basketball, and baseball players but 13 sports in total so far. The whole program is a scam. These guys put Bernie Madoff to shame. And how did these football players know to sign up for this newly added class just days before summer school? What advisors put these kids in there? We already know Hobbs Johnson needed these classes to stay eligible for this year. How mant basketball players needed these same classes?

  9. It is a culture in sports at most big universities. These kids are the same kids that attend private schools and prep schools and receive an A for every course to allow them to qualify by making only the bare minimum on the SAT. This behavior is not tolerated at Davidson.

    Coaches and staff like to recruit athletes that can barely qualify as a student athlete. They would not be admitted to the university on academics alone. And half will not graduate. The student athletes who work to achieve success in the classroom are typically not rewarded with a athletic scholarship. The message put out to work hard in the classroom is just talk. Take a look at the GPA and SAT scores of the scholarspip players and it will reveal the obvious.

    These big time programs have these student athletes working out or training 4 to 5 hours a day. There is not much time for study.
    And when they do study they are fatigue. Now you now why the Graduation Rate is not good for football and basketball players.

    It is very hard to complete a Chemistry Degree program or a Computer Science Degree program while attending college on
    an athletic scholarsip unless you are at MIT , Carnegie Mellon or Davidson.

  10. Typical unc excuse. Everyone is doing it. Granted, every school has a major or two that athletes that are weak students get funneled in. But not everyone has classes without professors, no syllabus and no classroom requirements and people forging professors signatures. Especially from a school that has forever marketed itself as holier than thou. No longer. The truth is finally out. Years of suspicions coming true. Sadly these same classes are open to non-athletes.

  11. Go Davidson Wildcats!!!!!

    Chapel Hill needs to bring back Matt Doherty. He ran a clean program.

  12. Where the hell is smh? We need his take on this. Afterall,he is the #1 UNC apologist. Classes without the following: Professor,meeting place,syllabus, assignments——only at UNC-CH.
    Yes, there may be easy classes at UNCG,A&T,App State,NC State,WCU etc, but I’ll bet they all have a syllabus and require some work and class participation.

  13. Latest discovery. There was a class taught for one student, a basketball player. No professor of record, no class, no syllabus, just a grade. Professors get 12K for teaching a summer school class. Who cashed a check? A forged signature of a professor that denies he taught the class. The ratio of students attending the classes in question is now public. there is no denying this information any longer. 13 sports had athletes taking classes in this program.

    Back in the 90’s the African American Studies program was started. Who was over unc athletics at the time. None other than John Swofford, head of the ACC.

    Obviously there are many difficult majors and classes at unc. the school has put out more than their fair share of talented scholars. But how many benefited from these classes?

  14. I had heard that former governor Jim Hunt was looking into this problem several years ago and then he must have got sidetracked….

  15. Is smh over in Kenya partying with Dr. Nyang’oro?
    We should hear his take on this. I amsure this news so enhances his UNC degree.

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