The academic whistleblower against the North Carolina athletic department is resigning at the end of the semester after meeting with the school's chancellor, the Raleigh News & Observer reported Tuesday.
Mary Willingham made the decision after an hour-long, closed-door meeting with North Carolina chancellor Carol Folt on Monday. Willingham has been an instructor and school adviser for the last four years since leaving the athletics tutoring program after seven years of service, extramustard.si.com reported.
Willingham confirmed in an email to the News & Observer of her resignation but could not comment further because she has not yet posted grades for the spring semester and has not talked to her legal counsel or the school's human resource department.
According to the News & Observer, Jay Smith, a history professor at the school who is collaborating with Willingham on a book about the scandal, called her meeting with Folt a one-sided "tongue-lashing" on the chancellor's part.
Smith told the Raleigh newspaper that Folt berated Willingham for her comments about the academic scandal in recent months.
Earlier this year, Willingham told CNN that 8-10 percent of the Tar Heels football and men's basketball players were able to read only at a third-grade level. In 2011, she told the News & Observer that the tutoring program was steering student-athletes toward lecture-style classes that never met and only required a single term paper at the end of the semester.
A rough draft of a term paper went viral on Twitter for its brevity, problems with simple grammar and plagiarism. Though it turned out not to be what the student turned in for an African American Studies class, the student received an A-minus in the class.
The News & Observer confirmed more than 200 cases of no-show classes or suspected no-show classes in the African and Afro-American Studies department dating back to the mid-1990s. North Carolina confirmed the classes were fraudulent but also issued a mind-boggling response that the scandal was not an athletic-department issue because non-athletes also enrolled in the class and received the same typically high grades.
But student-athletes made up 45 percent of the enrollments in that department, the News & Observer noted, while they make up just five percent of the overall population.
Not surprisingly, Joel Curran, UNC's vice chancellor for communication and public affairs, denied that Folt's meeting with Willingham was "antagonistic," the News & Observer reported.
"(Folt) said that she had what she felt was a productive meeting," Curran said. "Mary had an opportunity to really share her points of view on anything that she wished, and the chancellor had her opportunity to share her points of view, but the chancellor did not characterize it as anything but a productive meeting."
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