In the past few weeks, a large amount of college athletes attending The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had been caught for taking “fake classes.” This is defined as cheating the system at UNC, simply because either they cannot make the grades to maintain playing a sport, or do not want to take the time to learn an actual subject. Since advancing education is the sole purpose for college, this approach the athletes chose was foolish.

Over the course of about 18 years, over 3100 athletes (along with a few groups of frat brothers and sorority sisters) took what is known as fake classes, or “paper classes.” These “paper classes” required no classroom attendance, no professor, zero homework, and only one essay paper per semester that every student received either an A or B on.

According to former Tar Heel football player Tydreke Powell, “Everybody knew about the classes.” In order for this system of paper classes to work, it required that students, coaches and even some professors were on board with the idea.

Powell quoted former football coach Butch Davis, telling players,”If you all came here for an education, you should have gone to Harvard.”

Is this serious? If anybody were to have pride in his team (not only doing well in a sport, but striving in school), I would certainly expect a football coach to be the one. Not in this case. Davis decided to go against his school’s honor code and actually suggest the idea to cheat. All for what? A “new and improved” ruined school reputation.

One may assume that it must have been hard to continue this scandal for such a long period of time. Not so much. I have to give the students credit though, they kept the classes somewhat secret for over 18 years. Two former football head coaches, five professors and hundreds of students have admitted to knowing about the paper class situation, and yet did nothing to stop it. This greatly desolated the school’s reputation, and there has even been talk about removing past awards given to the school and specific players that earned these awards while taking the paper classes. The paper classes do not seem like such a good idea now that the administrative officers are talking about removing personal records.

This senseless situation could have been stopped numerous times, but due to the laziness and lack of school pride, the UNC staff members chose not to say a single thing. The school illegally (but incidentally!) allowed over 3100 students to continue playing the sport they came there to play, and forget about the actual educational part of college. Sounds like the “naive” staff at UNC should try the traditional college method and find a way to keep students taking real classes from here on out.