Football Favoritism at FSU (long NY Times)

Sep 1, 2017, 3:18 PM

Here's the FSU Article posted on NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/sports/ncaafootball/florida-state-football.html

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As the Florida State University football team was marching to a national title in the fall of 2013, the school was investigating allegations of academic favoritism involving a half-dozen of its leading players, including one who scored the winning touchdown in the championship game.

The inquiry, previously unreported, stemmed from a complaint by a teaching assistant who said she felt pressured to give special breaks to athletes in online hospitality courses on coffee, tea and wine, where some handed in plagiarized work and disregarded assignments and quizzes. The assistant, a 47-year-old doctoral student named Christina Suggs, provided emails and other evidence in late August 2013 to the Florida State inspector general, an independent office. But her case was soon taken over by the university’s attorney.

The allegations were especially sensitive for Florida State, which had been stripped of 12 football victories four years earlier because of improper assistance to athletes in an online music course. The university was also at the time facing a scandal involving its star quarterback, Jameis Winston, who was accused of rape but never charged.

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Christina Suggs was a teaching assistant at Florida State who said she felt pressured to give special breaks to athletes.
It is unclear if any of the conduct Ms. Suggs complained about resulted in athletes being improperly eligible to play. In a statement, the university said an outside consultant it hired to investigate found no wrongdoing. It refused to release any more information, saying that to do so would jeopardize the privacy of the students involved.

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CB Brown 1 hour ago
Um, academic credit for an online course in coffee and tea . . . really?
Jim L 1 hour ago
Yeah, but how 'bout that football team?As a former college academic and NCAA athlete, I saw firsthand the effects of corruption of money...
Matthew 1 hour ago
I read this article from my dorm room in Landis Hall at FSU. It's my freshman year, the end of my first week. This article made me ashamed...
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Even so, two things are certain: By the end of 2013, Florida State had tightened standards for the online hospitality courses. And Ms. Suggs had lost her job and left the school.

The story of Ms. Suggs’s experience trying to hold athletes to the same standards as other students, pieced together from emails, other documents and interviews, came to light during research for a forthcoming book, “Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports” (W. W. Norton). It offers a case study of how academic and legal imperatives often collide with the pressures of big-time college sports, at a time when academic fraud and sexual assault scandals are roiling campuses across the country, from Baylor University in Texas to the University of Mississippi.

Florida State was the focus of reporting by The New York Times in 2014 that examined the mishandling of criminal allegations against members of the championship football team, including Mr. Winston.

One of the players involved in Ms. Suggs’s complaint was James Wilder Jr., who had been arrested three times in the previous year and was on track to get, at best, a grade of D in one course. He emailed his professor as the summer semester was ending to say he needed a B “to keep myself in good academic place with the school.” The professor, Mark Bonn, who ran the hospitality courses, instructed Ms. Suggs to work with Mr. Wilder — he referred to him as “a starting star running back,” before noting that all students should be treated equally — and give him a chance to make up past assignments and submit missing portions of his final project, even though it had already been graded.

Ms. Suggs wrote that Mr. Wilder “should have done the work like everyone else” and objected to granting him special treatment, telling a colleague, “I am not offering this opportunity to other students.” The colleague agreed, summing up their mutual concern about Professor Bonn: “Trying to put a stop to his favoritism for athletes once and for all.”

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Former Florida State players Chris Casher, left, and James Wilder Jr. Credit From left: Joe Robbins/Getty Images; Don Juan Moore, via Associated Press
Friends of Ms. Suggs said she was painfully aware of the stakes involved in filing her complaint, including the possibility that athletes found in violation of academic standards might be ineligible to play under National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. All but one of the players identified in her emails went on to the National Football League.

“It was a huge heartache for her,” said Barbara Davis, a fellow doctoral student and close friend of Ms. Suggs. “She told me how there had been tremendous pressure on her to pass these football players, even though they didn’t deserve it.”

Plagiarized Work

In June 2013, administrators at Florida State’s Dedman School of Hospitality circulated a memo to teaching assistants. The school’s online courses in “beverage management,” the memo noted, were popular with “a large number of student athletes” who needed to be tracked closely.

“Like the on-ground classes, we’re asked to review athletes’ progress on a regular basis and report how they’re doing to their academic advisers,” the memo said.

Professor Bonn was familiar with Florida State athletics, having done studies on the economic impact of Seminoles games. He also helped conduct a hospitality school fund-raiser with the former football coach Bobby Bowden and the Seminole Boosters, a private group that supports the sports program. Email exchanges show that football players liked dealing with Professor Bonn, who seemed attuned to their roles on the team, telling one to “keep in top shape!” and referring to Mr. Wilder as the “star running back.”

He also shared a Tallahassee defense lawyer with Mr. Wilder and other football players in trouble; the lawyer, R. Timothy Jansen, represented the professor when his second wife filed for divorce in December 2012 and obtained a restraining order, which was later lifted with no admission of wrongdoing by Professor Bonn.

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Professor Mark Bonn, pictured in the center panel holding a wine glass, appeared in a photograph taken of a web page from the Florida State booster club called Old School. The top panel shows the former Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden, in sunglasses holding a helmet.
Professor Bonn’s interactions with Ms. Suggs initially were positive; he praised her work incorporating the concept of sustainability into a course on coffee and tea, according to emails among staff members at Dedman in May 2013. Ms. Suggs, a single mother working from home so she could raise her young son, also received good reviews from Dedman’s director, Jane Ohlin, who called her “absolutely fabulous” and said her “work ethic is above reproach.”

By midsummer, though, Ms. Suggs was growing frustrated. She said she felt pressure “to pad grades for the football players, and I told her I thought that was common practice,” said Phil Suggs, her estranged husband.

“But she said, ‘Not with me. If they don’t make it, they don’t make it,’” he said.

After a defensive end on the team, Chris Casher, handed in plagiarized work, Ms. Suggs alerted a program associate in the office, Aiden Sizemore, who sent an email to Professor Bonn saying the player had “copied every portion of his project” with no citations or sources listed. Professor Bonn allowed Mr. Casher to redo the work, explaining to him the meaning of paraphrase, that copied text needed quotation marks “before the first word and after the last word,” and that sources had to be listed at the end.

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Copied text in Kelvin Benjamin’s project
An identical block of text appears in both Mr. Benjamin’s project and this web page.

Mr. Benjamin’s presentation

Source page with identical text
eissa-alzubaida.com
The work of other players listed sources at the end, but they contained page after page of text lifted verbatim from websites, without quotation marks or citations. Those projects — by Mr. Wilder, Timmy Jernigan, Tre’ Jackson, Nick Waisome and Kelvin Benjamin, the wide receiver who caught the winning pass in the championship game — appear to have been accepted without question.

Another player turned in writing of his own that was barely grade-school level. “Brazilian coffee is one of few places that has a carnival and the coffee place a major role just as much as the dancing and the food,” he wrote.

Several players were allowed to make up missed assignments and quizzes long past the deadlines, even though course policy said it was “unacceptable to wait until the last week of class” to request it; on a couple of occasions, Professor Bonn deducted points for lateness.

Neither Professor Bonn nor any of the players responded to requests for comment for this article.

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Tre’ Jackson of Florida State in 2014. Credit Joe Robbins/Getty Images
Special Treatment

It was Mr. Wilder’s insistence that he should get a grade of B that seemed to have caused the most consternation. In his email to Professor Bonn, he claimed he had submitted work that he had not been credited for, while also acknowledging missing a handful of assignments and quizzes.

In response to the professor’s query, Ms. Suggs wrote that she “carefully reviewed James Wilder’s grades and can assure you that the work he missed is because he did not do it or did not turn it in.” She added, ”It is my opinion that he should have done the work like everyone else.”

Ms. Suggs had already graded Mr. Wilder’s final project, a PowerPoint presentation comparing coffee in Argentina and Kenya, which was incomplete. But Professor Bonn instructed her to allow him to submit missing sections and set a new deadline, prompting her to seek guidance from Mr. Sizemore, her colleague who had expressed concern about Professor Bonn’s “favoritism for athletes.”

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Copied text in players’ joint project
An identical block of text appears in Tre’ Jackson, Timmy Jernigan Nick Waisome’s work and this web page.

The players' presentation

Source page with identical text
wikipedia.org
One issue was that students were not allowed to make up missed assignments without a documented excuse, such as a medical problem, approved by the university. Mr. Sizemore replied that he would consult Ms. Ohlin, the school’s director, “as this is above both of our pay grades LOL.”

When Ms. Suggs had not heard back later that evening, she reached out to Mr. Sizemore again. “I don’t want Dr. Bonn to get mad at me for not responding to him. I also don’t want him mad at me for not doing what he says,” she wrote. “I really want to keep my job.”

“Go ahead with what Dr. Bonn wants to do,” Mr. Sizemore replied, “and just let me know if he tries to have anything else opened without documentation.”

Ms. Suggs gave Mr. Wilder the new deadline, but he missed that one, too, and another, before eventually turning in the material several days later. It is unclear if Mr. Wilder got his B. But Professor Bonn forwarded his work to Ms. Suggs, saying, “It looks great.”

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Copied text in James Wilder’s project
An identical block of text appears in both Mr. Wilder’s project and this web page.

Mr. Wilder’s presentation

Source page with identical text
commisceo-global.com
Corrective Measures

Although the university maintained that Ms. Suggs’s complaint was without merit, it clearly believed there were problems with the online classes at Dedman. It canceled some of them in the fall of 2013 and revamped the distance learning program, in the face of concern about “academic dishonesty” and other matters, according to emails among university administrators. In addition, Professor Bonn, who had run the distance learning program since 2009, stepped aside from that role.

“The one thing I desperately need is for there not to be any ‘drama’ around these online classes,” Ms. Ohlin, the director of Dedman, emailed a colleague in October 2013. “We have problems with plagiarism. Problems with the answers to tests” being accessible.

As for the complaint about Professor Bonn and the football players, the university said, “The decision to rework the online courses to ensure they were academically rigorous enough to support the College of Business degree had nothing to do with Ms. Suggs or her report.”

Under intercollegiate rules, schools can investigate academic cases themselves and decide if they warrant a report to the N.C.A.A. The main criterion for whether a violation occurred is if any misconduct resulted in an athlete being wrongly certified to play, said Gerald Gurney, a former senior associate athletic director for academics at the University of Oklahoma and past president of the Drake Group, which advocates for academic integrity in college sports.

“Clearly, there are academic integrity issues here that apply to N.C.A.A. rules, but the key is whether it affected certification of eligibility,” Mr. Gurney said, regarding the concerns raised by Ms. Suggs. “I would suspect that it is an impermissible academic assistance problem, but I’d need more information.”

As the 2013 fall semester came to a close and the Seminoles were preparing for the championship game, Ms. Suggs — who already had two master’s degrees — was informed that her job as a teaching assistant would not be renewed because she did not have enough business school credits. In an email to the inspector general, Ms. Suggs said that she believed she had lost her job “due to this unfortunate circumstance with Dr. Bonn and the investigation into the football players.”

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Timmy Jernigan, left, and Nick Waisome, center right. Credit From left: Joe Robbins/Getty Images; Tomasso Derosa, via Associated Press
Ms. Suggs decided to leave Florida State, after five years, with an education specialist degree — one step short of her doctorate. In her email to the inspector general, she added that she was “hoping just to put all of Florida State University behind me as I move forward with my life.”

Friends said her decision to leave took an enormous toll.

“I can’t stress enough how important this Ph.D. was to her,” said Melissa Isaak, another of her close friends, adding that next to raising her son, obtaining the advanced degree “was the single most important thing in her life.”

In the months that followed, in deteriorating health and deeply in debt with student loans, Ms. Suggs struggled to cobble together a steady income from online teaching jobs. She had back surgery in October 2014 and returned to her tiny rented condo in Panama City Beach, Fla., to recuperate.

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Not long after, Ms. Suggs lay down for a nap while her mother took her son out to a restaurant. They returned to find her unresponsive, a trickle of blood seeping from her nose.

The medical examiner determined that she had died accidentally from a toxic combination of prescription medicines for pain, anxiety and depression.

______________________________________________

Mike McIntire is the author of Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports published by W. W. Norton. Follow him on Twitter.

Correction: September 1, 2017
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Gerald Gurney. He is a former senior associate athletic director for academics at the University of Oklahoma; he does not currently hold that position.

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Football Favoritism at FSU (long NY Times)

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Heck no. The NYT is akin to The Enquirer in my opinion.

This NY Times article was amazing on Jason Everman

It took decades, but looks like

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