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“I was in Boxill’s class in the fall of 1993. UNC won the national championship in men’s basketball in April of that year. Several guys from that team were in the class. You couldn’t miss them, especially that day when those tall rascals moseyed in for an exam and finished the thing before the rest of us — and those dudes were working full-time jobs that required traveling all over the country slam dunking basketballs.”

The late great University of North Carolina. It’s all over but the witnessing, and there’s gonna be a lot of that. Now that we know pretty much everything, it’s time for I Was There.

Hey I was in one of those classes… I did wonder why the campus big shot who taught philosophy – ethics – let everyone in the class over six feet tall skip the course except for exam day and I wondered why they all knew exactly what to write right away on the exam… What kind of ethics is that, to single out just the tall people and tell them what’s on the exam and give them As even though they don’t even attend once?

Didn’t Jan Boxill explain that to you? The end justifies the means.

Margaret Soltan, November 4, 2014 5:17AM
Posted in: sport

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3 Responses to ““I was in Boxill’s class in the fall of 1993. UNC won the national championship in men’s basketball in April of that year. Several guys from that team were in the class. You couldn’t miss them, especially that day when those tall rascals moseyed in for an exam and finished the thing before the rest of us — and those dudes were working full-time jobs that required traveling all over the country slam dunking basketballs.””

  1. Mr Punch Says:
    November 4th, 2014 at 2:50PM

    Decades ago, at a top-ranked public university, I taught a class that included several members of a US national athletic team. Their behavior probably seemed odd to other students, especially the way they stuck together; and they missed quite a few classes because they were playing an international schedule; but they were well organized, really did study, and legitimately earned decent grades. There is a whole lot of academic malfeasance around athletics, of course – I’m just saying that athletes’ academic experience may be somewhat different from that of other students (which may be deplorable on other grounds) without damaging academic standards.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:
    November 4th, 2014 at 3:08PM

    Mr Punch: Absolutely. No reason why athletes – even busy important ones – can’t do good work. One of the saddest things about UNC (and similar stories) is that they make people stop believing that.

  3. Barbara Says:
    November 4th, 2014 at 8:45PM

    My friend and I were taking the same math class. We had different recitations based on our majors. Her recitation was filled with football players. A week before the final, the TAs gave each recitation a sample test to practice and go to the math center if necessary for assistance. We decided to share our sample tests so we had more problems to practice solving. I was shocked and felt like a cheater when I opened the exam and found the my friend’s sample test was the actual exam. I knew the answers without having to do any calculations since we spent a week working on the problems.

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