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March Madness is college basketball's annual shining moment, and few schools have shone as bright or as long as the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels have been in 18 Final Fours and won the national championship five times, most recently in 2009.

But today, UNC's athletics are also known for something else entirely: a massive academic fraud scheme. In Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports, UNC history professor Jay Smith and Mary Willingham, who worked with UNC's athletes for as a learning specialist, detail the scheme and attempts to cover it up.

They tell NPR's Robert Siegel how the scheme worked and how many participating faculty members explain their involvement.

Cheated

The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports

by Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham

Hardcover, 280 pages | purchase

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Read an excerpt

Interview Highlights

On how the scheme worked

Mary Willingham: Students were steered, or enrolled, by academic counselors — academic advisors that worked in the Athletic Department — to a lot of "paper classes" that were offered in the African-American Studies Department. And we traced the history of this system back, in the book, to the fall of 1988. I worked in the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes from 2003 to 2010 and I became aware of this system shortly after I arrived. ...

We told athletes to [go] to the African-American Studies Department, to the office manager, and get a prompt. And they would then go to the library or, with our assistance, just cut and paste from online material, or we would put something up on the screen that they would copy. And then they would just turn it in. No one really ever read them. They were always graded A or B.

On a course in which the professor only considered test questions the student answered – so if a student only answered 11 questions out of 20, he was graded out of 11

Willingham: That was in our School of Ed, of all departments. [In] the School of Education, we had a gentleman who taught a class — it was about public schools and about public education and about education here in North Carolina. So ironic. Many, many athletes over the years took this class because it only met one night a week for three hours. Many of them slept through it or left at the break. And then there was just one test at the end and you really only had to answer the questions that you knew or you thought you knew. And you would get a C or a B or an A. It depended on if he liked you or not. You know, you needed to make nice with him, too. It was ridiculous.

Jay Smith: Basketball players in particular are rumored to have done yard work for this professor, to have had dinner at his house. He was very, very chummy with the athletes. That phenomenon of the "friendly faculty" member is universal. Every campus has some. And they represent curricular weak spots — soft spots that will be taken advantage of systematically.

The Two-Way

Report Says UNC Grade-Boosting Scandal Involved Fake Classes

On the common feeling among "friendly faculty" that they're helping student-athletes get through a doubly difficult college experience

Willingham: I worked with a lot of people, and I actually felt that way for a long time myself. I felt like at least I was, you know, giving the opportunity to these young men to come to college and have some sort of a college experience and play their sport, which they were happy doing. So yes, I understand the sentiment. I understand the feelings. But I'm a mother. I have three kids and I wouldn't want anyone to treat them the way that these young men — and the way that I participated in this system of fraud — I wouldn't want my kids to be treated this way.

On the difference between what happened at UNC and the easy classes any student might take

Willingham: The difference is that we needed to keep players eligible. These students ... their transcripts are littered with other pass-through classes in drama, in geology, in philosophy. Not just, you know, like maybe you or I where we had some of those classes but we still had a major and got a decent education. The NCAA and its member institutions are promising these athletes a world-class education and that's not what they're getting at all. Not even close.

On how much the Chapel Hill academic community knew about the scheme

Smith: There were varying levels of awareness. I mean, there were plenty of academics — the majority, I would say, across the campus — who knew nothing at all. But there were plenty others in and around that department who had administrative contact with that department in one way or another, who had to have been aware in one way or another. And some administrators, some deans, surely had to have suspected that something was amiss. But it was more convenient to look the other way.

On what sets the UNC scheme apart from what other universities have done to keep their athletes playing

Smith: We're No. 1 ... let's get that straight: UNC is No. 1. But these pressures are applied to university faculties all over the country — faculties and administrators — because it's the same game being played. What I think sets off the UNC case, in addition to being such a long-running scandal — 20 years plus — is that our administrative leadership has been exceptionally reluctant to admit the meta-cause, the basic cause of all of the fraud, which is the need to keep athletes eligible. They just won't talk about it. ...

The current system is a mandate for fraud. It basically requires fraud and make-believe games.

Read an excerpt of Cheated

If you're trying out for a job in sales, the person who judges your pitch may not be a person — it could be a computer. Job recruitment is the newest frontier in automated labor, where algorithms are choosing who's the right fit to sell fast food or handle angry cable customers. And algorithms are deciding by sizing up the human voice.

Let's take a voice you know: Al Pacino. Think back to how he sounds in The Godfather, Devil's Advocate, Scarface or this recent interview on Charlie Rose.

The actor speaks with different accents, different emotions, different ages — and his range is stunning. But in every version, Pacino's voice has a biological, inescapable fact.

"His tone of voice generates engagement, emotional engagement with audiences," says Luis Salazar, CEO of Jobaline. "It doesn't matter if you're screaming or not. That voice is engaging for the average American."

Years and years of scientific studies and focus groups have dissected the human voice and categorized the key emotions of the person speaking.

All Tech Considered

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All Tech Considered

Can't Ask That? Some Job Interviewers Go To Social Media Instead

Jobaline has taken that research and fed it into algorithms that interpret how a voice makes others feel and cross-checks its judgment with real human listeners. It's a departure from other data science. With facial recognition, for example, algorithms sift through your smile, your brow, to decide your mood.

"We're not analyzing how the speaker feels," Salazar says. "That's irrelevant."

Regardless of whether you're happy, sad or cracking jokes, your voice has a hidden, complicated architecture with an intrinsic signature — much like a fingerprint. And through trial and error, the algorithms can get better at predicting how things like energy and fundamental frequency impact others — be they people watching a movie, or cancer patients calling a help line.

Through machine learning and multiple feedback loops, it keeps answering and homing in on Salazar's question: "What is the emotion that that voice is going to generate on the listener?"

SUBMIT YOUR VOICE

Do you have a voice for radio? NPR wants to hear it. We're collecting samples from listeners. We'll choose the best voice — based on a secret equation — and put it on air!

HOW TO SUBMIT:

1.) Go into a quiet room and launch a voice memo app on your smartphone.

2.) Hold the phone 1 foot away from your mouth, begin a recording and read this sentence: "I'm **FULL NAME** and this week on All Tech Considered, The Voice, public radio style, judged by computers." (Insert your real name.)

3.) Stop recording.

4.) Name the file with your FULL NAME.

5.) Email the file to nprcrowdsource@npr.org, subject line: Voice Submission. In the email, include your full name (it should match the file name) and the best number to reach you.

If we choose your voice, you'll get a call from NPR tech reporter Aarti Shahani.

THE FINE PRINT:

NPR will select several submissions to be sent by NPR to Jobaline, a company that evaluates voices for jobs. Your name will be used in the submission, but no other personally identifiable information will be given to Jobaline. By submitting your voice, you give NPR permission to submit your sample to Jobaline along with your name. You agree that NPR is not responsible for any actions of Jobaline or Jobaline's use of the submission.

Aside from the permissions granted in Paragraph 1, your submission to NPR is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

You grant NPR the right to use your recording for any purpose and in any and all media in perpetuity, and you waive any claims to privacy, publicity or related claims with respect to NPR's use of your submission.

You agree that, if selected in NPR's discretion, your voice may be used on air.

So far, Salazar says, the Jobaline secret formula can pinpoint if a voice is engaging, calming, and/or trustworthy.

Note: It's not a lie detector test. You could be a big liar, but just sound like someone honest.

Use It For Hiring

Big companies pay Jobaline to help them sift through thousands of applications to find the right workers for their hourly jobs. Human recruiters make the final judgment, but the startup determines the small pool that gets human consideration.

Jobaline says it has processed over half a million voices for positions including sales, janitorial staff and call center workers.

"In the hospitality industry, in the retail industry, you want people engaged. The average span of attention is four seconds," Salazar says.

That's very short.

The benefit of computer automation isn't just efficiency or cutting costs. Humans evaluating job candidates can get tired by the time applicant No. 25 comes through the door. Those doing the hiring can discriminate. But algorithms have stamina, and they do not factor in things like age, race, gender or sexual orientation. "That's the beauty of math," Salazar says. "It's blind."

Career Counseling

As a woman who has built a career on talking, I'm curious what the algorithms have to say about me.

My friends say I've got two voices: the inviting, empathetic "Hey how you doing, come on over" voice. And the "Don't mess with me. I'm getting work done" voice.

Salazar ventures to guess the intrinsic quality: "I'll say it's engaging and trustworthy. I don't think it will make the bar for calming. We'll see."

The algorithms agree. They say, with 95 percent certainty, that my voice is engaging to three-quarters of Americans.

So, I'm a good fit for radio.

algorithms

Jobs

After the sun sets on Havana on weekends, G Street turns into a kind of runway.

Blocks of the promenade — which is very colonial with its big, beautiful statues and its impeccable topiaries — swell with crowds of young Cubans. For the most part, they just walk up and down, greeting each other with kisses.

It's a spectacle: Everyone, it seems, is here to impress. They're perfectly coiffed, perfectly matched, they're splayed on benches, arms wrapped around each other.

We stop to talk to Tatiana, 17, and her group of friends. We ask her what she hopes will come of a new relationship with the U.S.

"We're going to be able to travel. We're going to have Internet," she says, growing excited. "Unlimited Internet. Finally."

What you quickly find out here in Cuba is that the Internet has become an object of desire: something as rare and valuable as strawberries that everybody wants.

By any measure, Cuba's Internet penetration rate is dismal. The government says that about 25 percent of Cubans have access to the Internet. But Freedom House, a watchdog that promotes freedom globally, says that number refers to Cubans who have access to a government-run intranet. According to Freedom House's experts, only about 5 percent of Cubans have access to the open Internet.

That's why Facebook and the World Wide Web have become a kind of promised land.

As we walk through G Street, we notice that many of the kids clutch smartphones. Out here, they're essentially useless, because the only real way to get on a Wi-Fi network is to pay $5 an hour at a tourist hotel.

We ask the group why they think Cuba doesn't have widely available Internet — and if they accept the government explanation that the lack of infrastructure is the result of the U.S. embargo.

They laugh. Christian, an 18-year-old drummer, answers. He looks like a typical teenage skater with long hair, baggy pants and Vans shoes.

"Cuba does not want us to know the things that happen in other countries," he says.

Daniel, 18, interjects: "Only they," he says, making epaulets on his shoulder with his fingers, "can have Internet." Then he tugs at an imaginary beard, Cuba's universal symbol for Fidel.

"Only Fifo can have Internet access," he says.

We point out that what's going on here on G Street is actually kind of nice: a bunch of kids talking to one another, without having their heads buried in a screen. If indeed there is new openness in Cuba and the island is flooded with foreign investment, and with it Internet connectivity, this scene would probably cease to exist.

The moment they hear that, they erupt with giddy laughter, imagining a future in which they would lie on their beds and still be able to connect with friends and the world.

"I'm already an expert texter," Tatiana says.

A Limited Internet

For years, Cuba accessed the Internet using satellites. It meant that the connection was slow and sluggish and had severe limitations on the amount of data that moved in and out of the island.

At the beginning of 2013, Doug Madory, of Dyn, an Internet performance company, noticed that the Internet speed on the island had become significantly better. He figured out that Cuba had turned on a huge underwater fiber optic cable that Venezuela had run from its shores to the eastern end of Cuba. Madory says the cable — called the ALBA-1 — has the capacity to move a huge amount of data to and from Cuba.

He says that right now, Cuba's lack of Internet has little if nothing to do with the embargo.

"We've been making the case that if Cubans really want to do this, they have a good model in Myanmar," Madory says.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, turned its ruling military junta into a nominally civilian government in 2011. That's given rise to a more open society and an improved relationship with the United States.

Madory says that shortly thereafter international telecoms lined up to provide Myanmar with the infrastructure to access the Internet. Because of the advancement in mobile Internet, the deployment has happened rapidly.

Madory says Cuba could follow suit even if the U.S. embargo against it continues.

Non-American "telecoms would be lining up around the block to work in Cuba if they were allowed," Madory says. "Not only that but they would be willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for that right and Cuba could probably use that money."

Long Waits To Get Online

One of the ways to get online in Havana is to visit the offices of the state-owned telecom monopoly, ETECSA.

We find an office, painted blue and white, in a leafy neighborhood called Miramar. Two priests from the Ecumenical Catholic Church of Christ, Monsignor Stefanos and Father Fanurios, are sitting on the porch.

This is their second time in line. Earlier in the day, they had traveled 45 minutes to the office and then waited outside for another 45 minutes, only to be told finally that the connection was down.

Monsignor Stefanos says that he comes to ETECSA to check his email every few days. That's the only way he can keep in touch with his leadership in Central America.

Cubans wait in line to use four computers connected to the Internet at the offices of Cuba's state-owned telecom monopoly. Eyder Peralta/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Eyder Peralta/NPR

So, they sit patiently as people are called by the police officers to walk inside the air-conditioned building and use one of the four computers connected to the Internet.

At the end of the day, the clerics will have accomplished one thing: checking their email.

"We're Cuban," says Father Fanurios, resigned. "We're Cuban and with needs."

A Special Case

Without a doubt, the Internet in Cuba is tough. But there is an oasis in the midst of this digital desert.

It's in a poor neighborhood in Havana called El Romerillo. That's where the artist KCho (pronounced "CAH-cho") built his studio.

KCho is a bear of a man, bearded and wearing a Rolex watch. As he walked through his vast complex, which also houses a cafe, a library and a gallery, a group of young girls followed, giggling as he expounded on being a son of the Cuban revolution.

He's a superstar; his paintings and sculptures, often made with pieces of boats, have been exhibited worldwide — in Spain, in Italy and even at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City.

The prominent artist KCho provides free Internet at his studio in Havana. Eyder Peralta/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Eyder Peralta/NPR

Because he's an artist, the Culture Ministry allowed him to have an Internet connection. He told us that when he first moved into this space, a 2-megabit Internet connection was too broad just for him to use. So, in 2013, he connected a few computers to the Internet and made them public, and in January, he installed wireless routers to share the connection more widely.

"The Internet was invented for it to be used," he says. "There's this big kerfuffle here in Havana that KCho has Internet at his place. There's nothing to it. It's just me, who is willing to pay the cost and give it to the people. It's about sharing something with people, the same way my country does. I've always worried that people have what they need, just like the revolution did, and so I'm trying to give people a place to grow spiritually. A library, an art studio — all those things are important."

KCho says that bringing Internet to the masses is not the responsibility of the government. It is, he says, an "entrepreneurial responsibility."

"And if it's so important for young people to have Internet, my dream is to bring more of it to them and to have a space here where they can travel the world without spending a dime, a place where they can travel from India to Burundi, to Antarctica, to the Library of Congress," he says.

i

"Miracle," a work by KCho that hangs in his studio, shows Jesus crucified on a cross made of oars. Eyder Peralta/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Eyder Peralta/NPR

"Miracle," a work by KCho that hangs in his studio, shows Jesus crucified on a cross made of oars.

Eyder Peralta/NPR

When asked if the Internet could be detrimental to the revolution, he says that a shift away from socialism is simply not on the table.

"But it's also not an option for me to renounce what I'm doing," he says. "It's not an option for me to take back what I've already given to Cubans."

The Internet at KCho's place is Cuba's first free hotspot, and it's on 24 hours a day.

That means that the place is a hive of activity: There are people leaning on the outside walls, staring at their smartphones. In the library, people get on a waiting list to watch funny videos on Yahoo.

Yoan Istameyer, 29, is sitting along a concrete retainment wall. He is with his friend Yendy Rodriguez, 20, but they aren't talking. They're glued to a screen.

Istameyer says he has been there since the night before.

Yoan Istameyer, 29, in the black shirt, and Yendy Rodriguez, 20, wearing orange, spend hours at KCho's studio, which is connected to the Internet. Istameyer says that when his girlfriend asked him to choose between her and his Wi-Fi connection, he chose the Internet. Eyder Peralta/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Eyder Peralta/NPR

"I never leave," he says. The Web and especially Facebook keep him hooked.

He says that there are only two places in Havana with free Internet: KCho's place and the U.S. Interests Section along the Malecon. He'd gone to the Interests Section twice before, he says, but he decided to stop because of the political baggage that comes with stepping foot inside a U.S. installation.

Rodriguez says that he had just heard of this place and he is thrilled. We ask him if the Internet had changed his life in any way. Rodriguez shakes his head: not really.

Then Istameyer cuts in. He's young. He's brash. He'll hand you his email address as soon as he can.

"I even left my girlfriend for Wi-Fi," he says, eliciting laughter from his friend, Rodriguez.

The Internet — and the social connections across the world that it gave him the freedom to make — had drawn Istameyer in so much that his girlfriend gave him an ultimatum: Wi-Fi, which Cubans pronounce "wee-fee," or me.

Istameyer chose the Internet.

Cuba

Internet

There will be a question from some about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility to run for president.

That's because even though Cruz grew up in Texas, he was born in Canada. (He renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2013.)

Democrats are sure to remind voters of Cruz's Canadian birth since some on the right have questioned where President Obama was born. The president is a native of Hawaii.

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Sen. Ted Cruz says because his mother was born in the United States that makes him a "natural born citizen" and eligible to run for president. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Scott Olson/Getty Images

Sen. Ted Cruz says because his mother was born in the United States that makes him a "natural born citizen" and eligible to run for president.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The U.S. Constitution says presidential candidates have to be "natural-born citizens." But the Supreme Court has never weighed in with a definition, leaving it open to interpretation.

It's a question that has come up before. In 2008, senators passed a resolution, making it clear, for example, that John McCain was allowed to run given that he was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both senators then, voted for it.

Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, was born in Arizona when it was a territory – not a state. And some questioned George Romney's eligibility to run in 1968, because he was born in Mexico. Romney's parents were U.S. residents.

Cruz's parents worked in the oil industry in Calgary, Canada, when he was born. His mother was born in the United States. His father was born in Cuba, but later became a U.S. resident. Cruz argues that because his mother was born in Delaware, he is, in fact, a "natural-born citizen."

Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen...shall be eligible to the Office of President." U.S. Constitution hide caption

itoggle caption U.S. Constitution

And most legal scholars agree. In fact, two of the best-known Supreme Court lawyers – who are not normally on the same side – make the case that Cruz – as well as McCain, George Romney and Goldwater – is eligible to run.

Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, and Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under George W. Bush, wrote earlier this month in the Harvard Law Review that "there is no question" Cruz is eligible.

They cite that because Cruz's mother was a U.S. citizen and his father was a U.S. resident, "Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus a 'natural born Citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution" and the "Naturalization Act of 1790."

They also point to British common law and enactments by the First Congress, both of which have been cited by the Supreme Court.

Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase "natural born Citizen" includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent. As to the British practice, laws in force in the 1700s recognized that children born outside of the British Empire to subjects of the Crown were subjects themselves and explicitly used "natural born" to encompass such children. These statutes provided that children born abroad to subjects of the British Empire were "natural-born Subjects . . . to all Intents, Constructions, and Purposes whatsoever."

The Framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like "natural born," since the statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War. They were also well documented in Blackstone's Commentaries, a text widely circulated and read by the Framers and routinely invoked in interpreting the Constitution.

No doubt informed by this longstanding tradition, just three years after the drafting of the Constitution, the First Congress established that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were U.S. citizens at birth, and explicitly recognized that such children were "natural born Citizens." The Naturalization Act of 1790 provided that "the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States ... ."

The actions and understandings of the First Congress are particularly persuasive because so many of the Framers of the Constitution were also members of the First Congress. That is particularly true in this instance, as eight of the eleven members of the committee that proposed the natural born eligibility requirement to the Convention served in the First Congress and none objected to a definition of "natural born Citizen" that included persons born abroad to citizen parents.

Katyal and Clement conclude, "There are plenty of serious issues to debate in the upcoming presidential election cycle. The less time spent dealing with specious objections to candidate eligibility, the better. Fortunately, the Constitution is refreshingly clear on these eligibility issues."

2016 Presidential Race

Ted Cruz

Supreme Court

Republicans