Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports Hardcover – March 15, 2015

Cheated is a bellwether book that tells how the University of North Carolina cheated athletes out of a real college education. while it profited at the expense of academic integrity."To be successful, one must cheat. Everyone is cheating, and I refuse to cheat.” So said former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins when he moved to eliminate the school's football program in 1939. What is to be said about cheating after a remove of more than three-quarters of a century? Simply stated, everybody seems to be cheating in one way or another.Cheated illuminates the egregious academic corruption that took place at the University of North Carolina (UNC). It was written with a definite purpose in mind, to wit: To have well-informed insiders lay bare in ground-breaking, consummate detail, the anatomy of the university's betrayal of its academic mission and consequent loss of academic integrity—cheating athletes out of a real college education.Sadly, as the authors note, this corruption is not unique to UNC. As Hutchins said: "They all cheat." However, some colleges and universities are better than others at not getting caught. Winning at any cost is the name of the game so who wouldn’t cheat to gain fame and fortune, especially when responsible parties fail to take decisive action.I found Cheated to be the apotheosis of what goes on in a university seduced by the ocean of money and; related profits associated with big-time collegiate athletics. This must-read book could, in time, prove to be the undoing of big-time college sports programs supported by the NCAA and its member institutions, aka the NCAA cartel. Note that the book is not for anyone who really doesn’t want to know how prize-winning, college-sports sausage is made.“The great value of the UNC scandal was not its ability to galvanize faculty outrage but rather it demonstration of the sheer perversity of the current system. The flood of money, the pressure to win, the creation of a university brand that identified the institution addenda fight the institution with a tradition of athletic success, the customary disregard for the educational experiences of black athletes: all of these forces led sensible people to accept or overlook irrational behavior at UNC, “to normalize deviance,” in the words of sociologist Diane Vaughan,” say the authors.This book is about as good as it gets when focusing sunshine on a festering wound—prompting the resurrection of two circa 2006 CLIPS commentaries that were appended as references to my comments on the False Claims Act as applied to the NCAA false claim that big-time college athletes are primarily students. These comments appeared in the March 14, 2015 College Athletics CLIPS commentary “College Athletics: On Cheated and the False Claims Act.”It’s not likely that Cheated will be high on the reading lists for presidents and provosts of colleges and universities supporting big-time football and men's basketball programs. Looking the other way has been a vital part of their modus operandi and job security. What administrator wants to kill the goose that's laying golden eggs by wanting to know how their own athletes may have been, and possibly still are, being cheated of a college education? It's comforting for them to simply believe that tutors, remedial programs, and facilities are adequate not only to the task of gaining and maintaining eligibility for academically disadvantaged recruits, but also for providing these recruits an educational opportunity that they might otherwise not have.It's also comforting for administrators to adhere to this belief even when the time demands of their athletic programs leave scant chance of seizing the educational opportunity as well as when some of their recruits are long on athletic abilities but are either short on academic abilities or lack the desire to learn. Here, the October 5, 2012, tweet by Ohio State’s 2015 Rose-Bowl-winning quarterback Cardale Jones comes to mind as an example, "Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS."Today the once lonely journey to collegiate athletics reform is far from being lonely as it now has many more travelers. They include activists such as Kain Coulter, Ramogi Huma, Kadie Otto, Allen Sack, Ellen Staurowsky, and Sonny Vaccaro; authors Taylor Branch, Jason Gay, Dave Ridpath, Jay Smith, Mary Willingham, Mark Yost, and Andy Zimbalist; columnists such as Frank Deford, Pat Forde, Patrick Hruby, Mike Imren, Dan Kane, Joe Nocera, Renee Schoof, Jon Solomon, Rick Telander, and Dan Wetzel; as well as documentarians Lowell Bergman and Zach Stauffer, among many others.Nevertheless, it is still disappointing to see the notable absence on the journey of active college and university presidents, trustees, and faculty. They remain caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The rock is their professional and moral obligation to protect the academic integrity of their schools. The hard place is the felt personal obligation of job protection .and avoidance of retaliation by adherents of the status quo. Given the human condition, almost all have dependents and mortgages, .the latter position appears locked in place unless and until the school's athletics-related commercial entertainment business is divested from its athletics department by whatever means necessary.After finishing this well-referenced book, the reader may be hard pressed to answer the question: Who still wants to tackle biggest man on campus? The reaction to an October 5, 2005, letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal should provide a good sense of the difficulties faced by faculty members and others who want to do right by their moral obligation to protect the academic integrity of their institution. The letter was headlined “Who Wants to Tackle Biggest Man on Campus?.” It is another example of the high stakes involved when one considers the fact that the letter led to retaliation soon after its publication.The authors provide a clear demonstration of how bringing about change in the status quo of big-time college sports is an arduous task to say the very least. However, thanks to the O'Bannon class-action, anti-trust case against the NCAA driven by Sonny Vaccaro, the National Labor Relations Board hearing on the unionization effort at Northwestern University led by Ramogi Huma and Kain Colter, Jeffrey Kessler’s antitrust suit challenging the NCAA’s right to limit an athlete’s pay in any form, and the publication of Cheated, dramatic, hard-fought change will soon be taking place---biggest man on campus notwithstanding.To learn more, the reader is encouraged to view the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brad Wolverton’s March 26, 2015, interview with co-author Mary Willingham, “The Athletic Machine Is in Charge of the University,” and see Sara Ganim’s 's Jan. 9, 2014, CNN piece, "Women who blew whistle in student-athlete cases and what happened next.” All of these women have been inspirational with some breaking ground well ahead of their time. They were all recipients of The Drake Group's Robert Maynard Hutchins Award.Finally, on a personal note, it was inspiring to see the courage displayed by the authors as they engaged a corrupt system. I consider them to be modern-day heroes. It is comforting to see the future of collegiate athletics reform in the hands of a new generation of leaders, for example, see Paper Class Inc. On the other hand, the greatest disappointment in my 12-year collegiate sports reform odyssey, has been a perceived lack of courage and leadership on the part of elite private schools that not only shy away from leading collegiate athletics reform as was my expressed hope, but also continue to harvest gold from their sports entertainment businesses.AFTERWORDCHEATED along with Pulitzer-Prize-Winning, Seattle Times' reporters, Ken Armstrong's and Nick Perry's SCOREBOARD, BABY: A Story of College Football. Crime, and Complicity, like Paul Gallico's classic, FAREWELL TO SPORT, are replete with disturbing facts and allegations. The authors tell equally disturbing stories about the dark side of big-time college football and basketball -- exposing a community's collective convoluted values -- while back in 1937 Gallico said "Colleges have managed to get themselves involved in a dirty and subversive business." The tale of this business is one of several dimensions and has been told in these and several other revelatory books.The CHEATED and SCOREBOARD, BABY narratives could serve as fitting metaphors for the crime, complicity, and warped values associated with professionalized college sports in America with a one-to-one mapping of the two book's cast of local characters, organizations, and citizens onto corresponding entities on the national scene. Why so?Looking the other way and declining to act on abundant evidence of widespread wrongdoing is commonly seen to be the best way to keep your job as an elected official, as a government or a college administrator, or as a news media reporter. Likewise, appalling silence and indifference can be expected from non-sports-addicted university faculty, students, and parents, as well as from 'good-citizen' taxpayers across America.I believe readers will also see striking evidence of local complicity in coverups of wrong doing in Jon Krakauer's new book Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.

It's hard to think of a reason to buy this book. The authors do provide an overwhelming case that UNC was breaking the NCAA rules, such as they are, and that its administration's initial reaction was to try to make it all go away without annoying anyone. A reaction which must be shared by well over 95% of those caught in similar circumstances. UNC's sin was not so much that it tried to stonewall and dissemble, as that it failed in these efforts. And its failings were not unique, so they are unlikely to be of interest to the outsider such as I. Even for the most enthusiastic of Tar Heel supporters there is little to be found here. Most of the dirty linen has been talked about in the Raleigh papers, and other books. What, then, is to be learned by wading through all of the minutia of UNC's failed efforts to cover up? What is, at bottom, most astonishing is that anyone involved in the program would have been surprised to discover that when a school admits "student athletes" whose high school grades and SAT scores make it clear that they aren't up to college standards, and then makes these sub-par admittees spend virtually all of their free time honing athletic skills, it is unlikely that they will do well in any college activity other than the one they're there for---using the "profit sports" as a gateway to the pro leagues..Nor is what happens at the schools emphasizing for profit sports any different from the sorry pattern in every sports league with any form of restriction on who can be on the team. Many coaches bend the rules, or just plain cheat, in order to get the best talent. Last year we witnessed the Little League, for heaven's sakes, disqualify a team for recruiting outside its borders. When softball season comes around, there are companies which suddenly find a need to hire a guy whose only skills seem to be on the ball field. At UCLA, the women's softball teacm some hyears back, featured an Aussie, Tanya Harding, an Australian woman softball star enrolled in school for an entire quarter, played softball for UCLA, and then went home. And, as Smith and Willingham note, the pressures on high-paid profit sport coaches to produce winning teams are simply too great for any normal human to avoid. It is even whispered that John Wooden, the saint of UCLA basketball may have had some help in attracting particularly good players.What was most disappointing about the book, to me, was what I considered a very unrealistic theory by the authors, that the "student athletes" were being cheated out of the great college education that had lured them to UNC. It is, of course, possible that any school will snare an occasional recruiting miracle who really does want to go to school. Bit as the authors make clear, a huge number of them just don't have the intellectual horsepower to get much benefit from book-learning at college; and are, admittedly, enrolled in the school solely to be in the athletic program. If he or she) is that smart, they can try their hand at making the team while carrying a full academic load during the season. Better by far, as is suggested in passing that the athlete be allowed a tuition free ride back through school after his playing days are over..Overall, a mildly informing book for one who thinks, as I do, that college "for profit" athletics ought to be separated from the schools, and the players paid. But I didn't need this book to convince of me of that. It's enough to just read the Sports pages.

Excellent work and presentation. This farce of "student athletes " needs to be resolved by the NCAA and if they won't do it then Congress needs to act. The young men who can't qualify academically need help, but not what is happening by their so called " Institutions of Higher Learnings". It needs to start with High School education giving them proper preparation for college and not false hopes with sports. Life is full of challenge's which I believe can only be met with education, incredible personal effort and good mentoring along the way from family and the teachers we have in life who truly care. I know as I went through it myself.