According to a report released Wednesday from the University of North Carolina, school academic advisers pushed athletes towards "sham" classes over an 18-year period. The report does not directly implicate coaches or athletic administrators.
The report details collusion between North Carolina's athletic department and a manager in the African and Afro-American Studies department in which student-athletes took classes that boosted their GPAs and kept them eligible in the eyes of the NCAA.
Longtime department chairman Debby Crowder oversaw the classes which were in place from 1993 to 2011. Students in these classes were allowed to write a 10-page minimum paper instead of attending classes or meeting with professors. Crowder, who was not a professor, graded the papers, which typically earned an "A or B-plus grade."
The report revealed that some academic advisers working with student athletes knew Crowder and notified her of how high a student's grade needed to be in order to maintain a 2.0 GPA, the minimum for active eligibility. The report also reveals that those advisers pressured Crowder to make exceptions for athletes, allowing them to enroll in classes after the registration period had ended.
Julius Nyang-oro, former chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies department, took over for Crowder upon her retirement in 2009. Nyang-oro was pushed to continue the program until he was forced to retire in 2012 when fraud charges were brought against him for holding summer classes that did not exist. The charges were dropped after he agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
"The Crowder/Nyang'oro scheme marked a horrible chapter in the history of this great university," North Carolina president Thomas W. Ross said Wednesday.
"Coaches knew there were easy classes," said Kenneth Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor and FBI counsel who now works for a Washington D.C.-based law firm leading the UNC investigation. Wainstein added that there was no evidence that coaches or administrators other than those in the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes knew that Crowder was grading papers instead of a professor.
School officials said Wednesday that they see the matter as both an academic and athletic issue.
"From the beginning, the university has taken the position that these classes started in an academic department by a person employed by the academic side of university ... and the athletic department took advantage of it," Ross said.
The university could face potential punishments from the NCAA as the governing body has re-opened its investigation after determining "additional people with information and others who were previously uncooperative might be willing to speak."
"The intent was really to get to the bottom of what occurred, and I think we did," UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham said, "but we are in the middle of a joint review and investigation with the NCAA. So this is just one piece of that process, but it was helpful to bring closure to the campus issue."
"This place is built on integrity," Cunningham said. "We need to provide a great education to students and I think we do that. We've lost trust and now we have to build back that trust.
