LINDA BENSEL-MEYERS Says she started to cry while looking over a former football player's transcript.

The player, whom she declines to name, had declared his major as engineering early in his career at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where Ms. Bensel-- Meyers is a professor of English.

But he "slipped to sports management, and then undeclared," she recounts, "and the student was academically dismissed after his last term of competition. Clearly, he had a dream of getting a good education when he started, but was deterred by the system, and finally got no degree at all."

That is just one of numerous allegations Ms. Bensel-Meyers makes against "the system," as she refers to the men's athletics department at Tennessee. Last month, she released the transcripts of 39 anonymous athletes, all but two of them football players. The documents show a pattern of athletes who received grade changes, who drifted through college without declaring majors, and who, in many cases, flunked out after finishing their eligibility to play.

Academic advisers in the department are to blame for the problems that she documented, she says, describing the advisers as more interested in keeping athletes eligible than in educating them.

WRITING PAPERS FOR ATHLETES

Ms. Bensel-Meyers released the transcripts along with a report detailing her accusations exactly one month after the National Collegiate Athletic Association closed an investigation into allegations that Tennessee athletes had received improper benefits from the athletics department in the form of excessive tutoring. Last fall, ESPN'S Web site reported charges that the department's Office of Student Life, which administers academic counseling, had encouraged tutors to write papers for athletes.

In response to Ms. Bensel-- Meyers's latest charges, Tennessee released a statement saying that committees from the university, the Faculty Senate, and the N.C.A.A. had looked into her allegations and found no improprieties.

As director of composition at Tennessee, Ms. Bensel-Meyers oversees a writing center that serves athletes and nonathletes alike. In 1995, she began studying the transcripts of athletes enrolled in introductory English, suspecting that they had received illegitimate help on papers submitted for the class.

Nine of the transcripts she released were for athletes who were enrolled in 1995. Last fail, she expanded her research to include all 22 of the starters on the football team.

CHANGING GRADES

The transcripts show that most of the athletes in Ms. Bensel-- Meyers's survey benefited from frequent changes to their final grades, and spent many semesters on "academic review," Tennessee's term for academic probation. The players had a median gradepoint average of 2.2, and 13 of them had averages of less than 2.0. In all, the players' grades in 105 courses were raised after being submitted-an average of 2.7 changes per player.

Nine of the 18 athletes who enrolled at Tennessee in 1996 or before had not declared majors by the end of the fall semester in 1999, according to Ms. Bensel-Meyers.

Four of the players were dismissed from the university for academic reasons after that term, ineluding three who had played four seasons of football.

Douglas A. Dickey, the men's athletics director, and Carmen J. Tegano, head of the Office of Student Life, angrily disputed the original charges in interviews last fall. Calls requesting comment from the men's athletics department and the Office of Student Life were not returned, but Mr. Dickey told the Tennessee student newspaper that the department would not respond to the charges before June 1.

"Male student-athletes at the University of Tennessee have the highest graduation rate of any subgroup," including female athletes and students of both genders, Mr. Tegano said at the time. "So, apparently, we are accomplishing our goal, which is basically to graduate our student-athletes."

Ms. Bensel-Meyers's findings were presented to the Faculty Senate last month. -WELCH SUGGS