2 former UNC athletes sue school, NCAA over academic failures
DURHAM (WTVD) -- UNC is in the cross-hairs once again over the academic scandal that has dogged the state's flagship university for years. This time, though, the NCAA is right there with the school.
Former State Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr filed a class action lawsuit in Durham Superior Court Thursday on behalf of two former UNC athletes: starting football player Devon Ramsay and women's basketball player Rashanda McCants, who is Rashad McCants' sister.
The suit draws on the Wainstein Report, which was released last year. It showed widespread academic fraud at UNC going back nearly 20 years. The report chronicled paper, or "no show" classes, that required little to no work by students and had little to no oversight by professors. The report also demonstrated how student athletes were steered into these classes to keep them eligible to play sports.
"Many students playing college sports don't get the same academic college experience other students do," said Orr. "If they're not going to be compensated, and they're going to make hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for NCAA member institutions, the least they should get out of it is a real college education."
"It's regrettable," Orr went on. "And I know all my friends at and from UNC would like this to go away. But despite reforms internally that UNC has implemented, there has been little or no talk about reform at the national stage academically, and I think the heart of lawsuit goes to that very question."
Orr's class action suit seeks a series of remedies from compensating students paid for sham classes and got nothing from them to the creation of a new body within the NCAA to root out academic fraud.
According to Orr, "that would be a huge reform step."
