UNC wrong on athlete academics

The University of North Carolina’s athletic program might be in deep this time.

Last week a whistleblower and sports reporter by the name of Bryan Armen Graham posted a photo on Twitter of an anonymous UNC student athlete’s final paper about Rosa Parks. It reads like a homework assignment of which a first grader would not even be proud.

The kicker? The instructor for the class gave the paper an “A-.”

It blew up on social media, and coincided with an ESPN video report posted two days earlier about student athletes at UNC taking so-called “paper classes,” which are specifically tailored to them, require very little work and are almost impossible to fail.

Given the micro-managing that goes on in major universities like these, it’s hard to imagine school officials didn’t know this was going on – especially considering the fact that all 19 of the students in that particular AFAM 280 class either were, or had been, members of the Tarheels football team.

After looking at the paper, it’s no wonder this has generated so much controversy. The one-paragraph “essay” is so rife with spelling and grammatical mistakes that it sounds like some kind of avant-garde satire.

Never before has the inspiring story of Rosa Parks been presented with such apathy. If this paper had somehow become public in the 1960s, there’s a good chance it could have been a major blow to the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. It’s almost impressively bad.

Already sounds like a disaster in the making for UNC, right? Wait, it gets worse.

On Monday, a report from the Huffington Post shows the paper was plagiarized. The whole paragraph was lifted from the introduction from a book called “Rosa Parks: My Story.”

It should be noted that the book is classified as a children’s book, which explains the short, unimaginative sentences and simple dialogue. But still, even as a plagiarized work — of which the title was also stolen — the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes are egregious.

It’s always wrong to plagiarize, but it’s almost disheartening when someone accepted into a top-flight university can’t even steal creative property without at least stealing the correct formatting and grammar along with it.

All joking aside, this story is deeply troubling and compromises the foundation in which student-athletes are based upon.

Student athletes are, after all, students. They’re expected to put in the same amount of hard work as the rest of the student body, even with busy travel and practice schedules that don’t allow for much free time. They shouldn’t be given special treatment just because they generate revenue for the school.

If student athletes like those aren’t really at school to learn, the school should come right out and say it. But to provide scholarships to athletes like those reportedly involved in the scandal at UNC who don’t work and earn A’s for not showing up to class and stealing peoples’ ideas undermines the intended duty of student athletes.

The higher-ups at UNC should be ashamed of themselves. Situations like these put a huge blemish on the face of collegiate athletics, and they undermine the value of a college education. They stigmatize student athletes across the country, and they give a bad name to the ones who do actually try in school and take advantage of the free education they are so fortunate to have.

After all, they are student athletes.