When Cheated hit bookshelves last March, the revelations in the book sent many current and former students of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill into a crisis of confidence. What on earth had happened to the great university in which alumni had once held such pride?
At the next Catawba College Community Forum, authors Jay Smith and Mary Willingham will talk about how an entrenched culture of “duplicitous boosterism” brought two very different people from different sectors of the UNC campus to produce a scathing exposé of the scandal. The desire to shelter athletic programs from careful scrutiny, they will argue, has corrupted university processes and, to a certain degree, the educational missions of all schools with big-time athletics.
Jay Smith is Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill. He earned a B.A. and M.A. from Northern Illinois University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has four books and numerous scholarly articles to his credit along with a long list of grants and awards, including a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and the Robert Maynard Hutchins Award for defense of academic integrity. His courses include “Western Civilization to 1650,” “Early-Modern Europe, 1450-1789,” “France in the Age of Monarchy, 1337-1750,” “Eighteenth-Century Europe,” “Old Regime France,” “The French Revolution,” and many more.
Mary Willingham previously worked in the Center for Student Success and Academic Counseling at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was an Academic Advisor in the Graduation Division and a Clinical Instructor in the School of Education. She holds a B.S. in psychology from Loyola University in Chicago, and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from UNC-Greensboro. Her research includes studies on the NCAA and university admission procedures regarding athletes, and their specific gaps in basic skills as well as the incidence of Learning Disabilities and ADHD. She is co-owner of Paper Class, Inc., a company dedicated to raising awareness of the need for NCAA reforms. She has appeared in several documentaries, as well as on HBO Real Sports, ESPN, and CNN.
Join us at the Catawba College Community Forum on Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 7:30 p.m. in Tom Smith Auditorium of Ralph W. Ketner Hall for an examination of the troubled relationship between academics and major college athletics today. Admission, as always, is free.
