Turns out that UNC athletics whistleblower Mary Willingham completed her master’s thesis —entitled “Academics & Athletics — A Clash of Cultures: Division I Football Programs”—- at UNCG. And now posters on Carolina’s athletics message board have picked apart Willingham’s thesis and are accusing her of plagiarism:
Posters at Inside Carolina, a UNC-CH sports fan site, found that several passages in the paper appeared to be cut and pasted from several published sources. Several of those sources were listed in the bibliography. At least one — a 2006 letter from then-U.S. Rep. Bill Thomas of California to Myles Brand, the NCAA president at the time — was not.
The News & Observer reported that it found several questionable passages when it examined Willingham’s paper with an online site called WriteCheck that can point out possible examples of plagiarism.
Willingham, a former athletics department tutor, blew the whistle in 2011 on lecture classes in the former African and Afro-American Studies department that didn’t actually meet. A UNC-CH investigation later found more than 200 no-show university classes over nearly two decades.
The Chronicle of Higher Education picks up the story, but only refers to UNCG as the “university’s Greensboro campus.”
