Two former University of North Carolina Chapel Hill student-athletes filed a lawsuit Thursday against their former school and the NCAA - the organization that governs college sports - claiming they were deprived of a "meaningful education."
The lawsuit - first reported by The Washington Post - follows a scathing investigative report released last October, detailing a decades-long academic scandal that predominantly affected UNC student-athletes.
The scandal centers around so-called "paper classes" - which typically never met and only required a final paper - that were offered through the African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department. These classes were explicity utilized by members of both UNC academic and athletic departments to help athletes achieve a minimum GPA to maintain their NCAA eligibility, according to former Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein's report.
The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit are former UNC basketball player Rashanda McCants and former UNC football player Devon Ramsay. Their lawyers are asking the court to certify the case as a class action.
"This case arises out of the NCAA and UNC's abject failure to safeguard and provide a meaningful
UNC and the NCAA did not fulfill their promise to scholarship athletes of a quality education and "breached their duties to student-athletes in spectacular fashion," according to the lawsuit. Rather, the lawsuit states:
UNC offered dozens of sham "paper classes" that were designed not to educate but rather to maintain UNC's student-athletes' academic eligibility-i.e., to keep them on the field. And over time these paper classes calcified into a "shadow curriculum" in which no course attendance was required and no faculty were involved.
The former student-athletes' complaint also details how these classes first started.
Former AFAM department administrator Deborah Crowder began the "paper classes" around 1989, under the supervision of AFAM chair Julius Nyang'oro, according to the lawsuit. When the classes started, Crowder "initiated a series of independent studies courses and invited enrollment from student-athletes" and, even though she was not a member of the UNC faculty, supervised and graded students' academic work, the lawsuit claims.
During much of the Class Period, Crowder managed these paper classes from beginning to end, but she provided the students with no actual instruction. She registered the selected students for the classes; she assigned them their paper topics; she received their completed papers at the end of the semester; she graded the papers; and she recorded the students' final class grades on the grade rolls.
When Crowder graded the papers, she typically awarded As or high Bs-even when she did not read the papers. Rather, she would typically read the introduction and conclusion and check to make sure the papers were of appropriate length.
The procedure somewhat changed in the late 1990s, according to the lawsuit, as Crowder began to register the classes as lecture courses, rather than independant studies. However, this did not seem to affect the enrolled students.
"Despite their lecture designation on the course schedule, these classes continued to operate in the same fashion," according to the lawsuit. "There was no class attendance or student interaction with anyone other than Crowder, and Crowder continued to grade the papers."
In a statement sent to Business Insider, NCAA chief legal officer Donald Remy said, "We have not yet been notified of the lawsuit filed in a North Carolina court today. Because we have not seen the filing, we have no comment."
Business Insider has reached out to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for comment on the lawsuit, and will update with any statement we receive.