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Contributor
Jay M. Smith
Historian of Europe, critic of university governance, advocate of educational access for athletes and all students.
Jay M. Smith is a historian of early-modern Europe who has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1990, the year he received his PhD from the University of Michigan. A specialist of aristocracy, the French "old regime," and the political culture of absolute monarchy, he has long been fascinated by the historical phenomenon of institutional corruption. First at Michigan (where he witnessed grade-changing and favoritism for varsity athletes in classes where he served as a teaching assistant in the late 1980s) and then at UNC-Chapel Hill (where he helped to expose systematic academic favoritism for athletes between 2011 and 2014), he eventually became interested in the NCAA cartel and its insidious effects on athletes, sports fans, and university staff. His two most recent books--reflecting his dual interests in history and college athletics--are Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Harvard, 2011) and Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports (Potomac, 2015), the latter co-authored with UNC athletics whistleblower Mary Willingham.