University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill Pays Mary Wellingham $335K in Lawsuit Settlement
ByAbout a month after the University of North Carolina (UNC) - Chapel Hill announced a settlement with Mary Willingham, details of the agreement have surfaced.
According to the Raleigh News and Observer, the school will pay Willingham $335,000 for legal fees and three years' salary. The newspaper reported learning the details of the settlement from obtaining a copy from Willingham's attorney.
The whistleblower in the UNC-Chapel Hill "paper class" academic scandal, Willingham accused the school in a lawsuit of forcing her to resign after the news broke. A former reading specialist at the school, Willingham initially told CNN she worked with student-athletes who read at a grade-school level. She also said she met some who were illiterate.
Willingham later detailed phony classes that took place for years in the African and African-American Studies department attended heavily by student-athletes. These paper classes rarely met, if at all, and acted as GPA-boosters to keep student-athletes eligible for their teams.
UNC-Chapel Hill later confirmed these classes existed after commissioning an independent review that upheld the claims Willingham catalyzed and several former Tar Heels backed up after her.
When UNC and Willingham first disclosed the settlement last month, the Associated Press reported, she had reportedly sought to get her old job back apart from the litigation.
"We appreciate the efforts of the mediator to help us achieve a successful and timely conclusion to the mediation," UNC spokesman Rick White said in a statement at the time. "We believe the settlement is in the best interest of (UNC) and allows us to move forward and fully focus on other important issues."
In all likelihood, UNC will be associated with the academic scandal for years to come, but they consider the matter with Willingham to be closed.
"I wanted to show other potential whistleblowers out there that it's possible to survive a fight with a big-money machine," Willingham said in a statement last month. "I thought it was time to get focused back on the issue of athletes and their educations - to correct the injustice in the NCAA system. I'm satisfied with the result."