More than 3,000 students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received credit for fake classes over an 18-year period as part of a program that allowed many of them to remain eligible to play sports, according to a report released on Wednesday, the New York Times reported.
Former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein led the investigation, which is only the latest of several attempts to uncover allegations of academic fraud involving student-athletes at a university known for both its academic rigor and athletics, according to USA Today.
"This is a very complex organization that needed oversight at every step of the way, and it didn't exist," Wainstein said at a news conference following the report's release. "It's pretty shocking that it didn't exist."
Wainstein found that more than 3,100 students received one or more semesters of "deficient instruction ... and were awarded high grades that often had little relationship to the quality of their work, USA Today reported.
North Carolina football players accounted for 963 enrollments in the so-called "paper classes," and men's basketball players accounted for 226 beginning in 1999, when Crowder began listing these independent study-style courses as lecture classes even though classes never met, according to USA Today.
The report does not incriminate any coaches or athletic administrators in the scheme, which it said was carried out by a former department head and former office administrator within the African and Afro-American Studies department, The Associated Press reported.
The "irregular classes" at UNC-Chapel Hill from 1993 to 2011 had no class attendance or faculty involvement, according to Wainstein's independent investigation, according to the Times.
Student-athletes accounted for nearly half of enrollments in the irregular classes, the report found, adding that among the non-athletes, many were struggling students who were referred through academic support services, the Times reported.
Many of them were directed to the courses by counselors in the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes, the report continued, with some counselors going so far as to provide rosters of athletes and the grades they needed to maintain eligibility, according to USA Today.
