Athletes spent too much time on social justice and change.
Via KC Star:
Yolanda Kumar, the whistleblower who triggered an NCAA investigation into academic fraud in the University of Missouri athletic department, told The Star in an exclusive interview on Tuesday night how and why she allegedly helped MU athletes cheat.
Kumar worked as a tutor for Mizzou’s Total Person Program off and on during the last six years. She said she was “groomed” to help keep athletes academically eligible, particularly football and men’s basketball players, and completed their classes, took tests and answered assessment questions.
She said she participated in at least a dozen serious cases of academic fraud involving both men’s and women’s athletes during a 16-month period.
“I think about what I’ve done and I cry, not because I’m sad or I’m weak,” Kumar said, “but because I’m so angry that I didn’t use my voice to say no.”
Kumar said she reported her “academic dishonesty” during an 18-minute phone call Nov. 2 with Mary Ann Austin, Mizzou’s executive associate athletic director for compliance.
“I was at my wit’s end,” Kumar said. “I had pretty much had enough, and I felt good that I had told her. Then, I realized I had opened all the evil and now the evil was out of the box and you can’t put it back in.”
“Academic dishonesty” is the term Kumar used Tuesday in a private Facebook post, which was obtained by The Star and other news outlets. She posted it early Tuesday afternoon after an attorney she’d consulted — but whose retainer she said she couldn’t afford — called to say he’d been contacted by the NCAA.
“I wanted to address my friends right away,” Kumar said, “because now the wolves are coming for me and I’m this fatty piece of meat and they’re like, ‘Let’s get her.’”
Mizzou and athletic director Jim Sterk announced 5 1/2 hours later that it had “received allegations of potential academic rules violations” and opened an investigation.
When The Star asked MU football coach Barry Odom about the investigation Wednesday during the weekly SEC Football Coaches’ Teleconference, he said, “I’m very confident in our compliance department, working through this situation. … I’m excited about getting through this process. I look forward to working with all the parties involved to get all the information, all the background on everybody that’s involved in this and moving forward.”[…]
Kumar, who received a bachelor’s degree in math and chemistry from Lincoln University in 2004 and a master’s degree in mathematics education from MU in 2010, first tutored for the Total Person Program in fall 2010 while working as an adjunct math teacher.
After becoming a full-time statistics professor and part-time math instructor during the 2011-12 academic year, Kumar stopped working as a tutor. She briefly left Columbia after the spring semester, but returned in fall 2012 and resumed tutoring.
That’s when the grooming started, as she puts it.
“You’re just groomed,” Kumar said. “It’s just something that’s understood and the next thing you know, the same person keeps sending you students with the same situation. … I was put in a situation where I felt harassed to do certain things.”
Kumar declined to name specific athletes or staff members because she expects to be asked to testify in the NCAA investigation. However, she said she can document each case of alleged academic fraud.
“At some point, I realized this might come back to bite me,” Kumar said. “There’s classes, semesters, students.”
Kumar said her “first inkling” that she was doing more than tutoring came when she had a student who stopped going to a math class.