Jan Kemp, an English professor at the University of Georgia who exposed exploitation of student athletes in the 1980s, leading to reforms in NCAA eligibility policies, has died of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Kemp was fired by UGA in the early 1980s for refusing to inflate the grades of varsity athletes who were in some cases functionally illiterate. When she sued the university for wrongful dismissal, the university’s academic policies were themselves put on trial.

In one of the most damning pieces of evidence, an audiotape was introduced on which the head of remedial studies at UGA could be heard telling fellow professors that student athletes were “a kind of raw material in the production of some goods to be sold as whatever product, and they get nothing in return.” 

Kemp was reinstated as a result of that trial, and awarded more than one million dollars in damages. The verdict led to the resignation of the university’s president, and to new academic standards for athletes at UGA and in the NCAA as a whole.