Report shows UNC athletes, other students enrolled in fake classes
Hundreds of athletes at the University of North Carolina enrolled in classes they didn’t have to attend and received artificially inflated grades in far-reaching academic fraud over an 18-year period, according to results of an independent investigation.
The report commissioned by the university was released Wednesday by Kenneth Wainstein, who is a former federal prosecutor and FBI counsel now working for a Washington D.C. law firm. The report was conducted over eight months and included 126 interviews.
The report said school academic advisers steered students and athletes into sham classes, but the findings do not directly implicate coaches or athletic administrators in the scheme.
The investigator called it a “shadow curriculum” involving more than 3,100 students, with 48 percent of the enrollees in those classes being athletes.
The report said academic advisers in UNC’s athletic department colluded with the manager in the African and Afro-American Studies department for student-athletes to take classes to boost their grade-point averages and keep them eligible in their respective sports.
The classes, in place from 1993 to 2011, were overseen by Debby Crowder and later by the department chairman. They allowed a student to write a paper of at least 10 pages, rather than attend lectures or meeting with professors. The papers were graded by Crowder, who was not a professor. They typically earned an A or B-plus grade.
According to the report, some academic advisers in the school’s Academic Support Program for Student Athletes (APSPA) had ties to Crowder and let her know how high a student’s grade needed to be to maintain a 2.0 GPA to be eligible to play. The ASPSA is not part of the athletic department, but is located in the same offices, according to ESPN.
When Crowder retired in 2009, Julius Nyang’oro, the former chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies department, was urged to maintain the program. He was forced to retire in 2012, and was charged with fraud for holding summer classes that didn’t exist. Those charges were dropped when he agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
Wainstein said investigators found a number of academic advisers saw these classes as “GPA boosters.”
“Coaches knew there were easy classes,” Wainstein said, but said there was no evidence that coaches or administrators, other than those in APSPA, knew Crowder was grading the course rather than a professor.
School officials said Wednesday that they consider the matter an academic issue as well as an athletic one.
“From the beginning, University has taken the position that these classes started in an academic department by a person employed by academic side of university … and athletic department took advantage of it,” University of North Carolina president Thomas W. Ross said.
The report also detailed a 2009 meeting that academic advisers held with the North Carolina football staff. Butch Davis was head coach at the time.
“Like everyone who reads it, I feel shocked and disappointed,” UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Carol Folt said in a statement. “When we find people who are accountable, we will take decisive action.”
Folt said the school will cooperate with the NCAA, which has not issued any sanctions.
The NCAA issued a joint statement with UNC later Wednesday:
“The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the NCAA enforcement staff continue to engage in an independent and cooperative effort to review information of possible NCAA rules violations as announced earlier this year. The university provided the enforcement staff with a copy of the Wainstein Report for its consideration. The information included in the Wainstein Report will be reviewed by the university and the enforcement staff under the same standards that are applied in all NCAA infractions cases. Due to rules put in place by the NCAA membership, neither the university nor the enforcement staff will comment on the substance of the report as it relates to possible NCAA rules violations.”
