Chapter
Eighteen
Carol Folt; Jan
Boxill; James Moeser;
Nyang’oro and
Crowder emails; public relations firms
As the date drew nearer when Holden Thorp would be
stepping down as Chancellor, his eventual replacement was announced. Carol Folt, an environmental scientist who
had worked for 30 years at Dartmouth College (including nearly a year as
interim president), was tabbed to take over UNC’s top spot. Based on quotes and details in an April 13,
2013, News and Observer article
covering a reception held in Folt’s honor, she indicated that she was excited
about her new duties. “It’s the honor of
a lifetime,” she said. “I just can’t
tell you how it feels. It’s a little bit
of a dream state.” Folt said she had
been on a tour of the campus, and that she and her husband had caught “Tar Heel
fever” when they attended a Duke-UNC basketball game the previous month. She did, however, allude to some of the
issues that had plagued the school over the prior several years. Referencing perspective, optimism, and
opportunity, she said: “That’s what will carry us through the tough
times.” Indeed, she wouldn’t have long
to wait for more “tough times” to surface.
*
* *
The previous chapter discussed requests for public
documents, and the often difficult obstacles the media had faced to get many of
its requests fulfilled. Several
documents were released in May, however, and they led to more discoveries of
possible improprieties. According to a
May 18, 2013, article in the News and
Observer, a key UNC report from a year earlier had purposely omitted
substantial information that would have painted athletics in a much more
critical light.
In July of 2012 a special faculty report on the academic
fraud (initially discussed in Chapter Eight) suggested that academic counselors
may have steered athletes to fraudulent classes in the AFAM department. A request by the newspaper for emails and
other correspondence related to that report had finally been filled by the
school, and the details revealed some interesting final-day edits. Earlier drafts of the report (but not the
final version) had specifically mentioned Deborah Crowder, the former assistant
in the AFAM department, and also noted her connections to athletics.
The earlier draft had the following statement: “Although we may never know for certain, the
involvement of Debbie Crowder seems to have been that of an athletic supporter
who managed to use the system to ‘help’ players; she was extremely close to personnel
in athletics.” However, documentation showed that Jan
Boxill, chairwoman of the school’s Faculty Executive Committee and also a
former academic counselor for athletes, wanted the statement cut because in her
opinion it amounted to hearsay. She told
the authors of the report that other professors, whom she did not identify,
raised that concern. The final version
did in fact make a change and read as follows:
“Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from
multiple interviews that a department staff member managed to use the system to
help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and
Afro-American Studies department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly
taught.” The final version had no
specific mention of Crowder, and more importantly no mention of her being
“extremely close” to athletics.
The May 18 N&O
article went on to make it clear that the information about Crowder was not
hearsay. Crowder’s ties to the athletics
department had been reported by the paper in June of 2012, and were also later
acknowledged in the Martin report. As
mentioned earlier, Martin never interviewed Crowder. He had, however, received both versions of
the faculty report in question. Why no
mention of Boxill’s requested edit was ever made in his report is unknown. Furthermore, other records showed numerous
bogus classes that appeared to have been set up by Crowder. Athletes accounted for all but eight of the
56 students enrolled in nine specific classes.
Those enrollments included 31 football players and eight basketball
players, all of which further cemented the “not hearsay” stance of the
newspaper. It was extremely unclear,
therefore, why the authors of the faculty report gave in to Boxill’s
request. More details on the matter
would surface several months in the future, however.
*
* *
As Holden Thorp’s tenure as chancellor continued to draw
to its end, more controversy arose, but this time by his own doing. He had said in April of 2013 that he felt
college presidents had pressing demands and therefore should leave sports to
athletics directors. That rubbed many
people the wrong way, especially at UNC.
Hodding Carter III was a UNC professor and former Knight Foundation
president. The goal of the Knight Commission
on Intercollegiate Athletics was to ensure that intercollegiate athletics
programs operated within the educational mission of their colleges and
universities. In a May 19, 2013, N&O article, Carter acknowledged
that college sports can take a leader down fast, but said that Thorp’s proposal
was way off base. “You really have got
to get control of (big-time college sports), but you don’t get control of it by
letting the guy who raised Godzilla become the person who now is supposed to
supervise Godzilla, and that’s what the athletic directors are, and the
conference guys.”
Thorp indicated that he knew his suggestion would cause
waves. “Bill Friday’s ghost and Hodding
Carter and all those people are ready to kill me,” he said. “They don’t admit that their presidential
control idea didn’t work.” It certainly hadn’t worked in the case of
Thorp, the newspaper wrote, who said he took the job with no idea about the
athletics minefield ahead. Too often,
Thorp said, he found himself in front of microphones trying to explain the
various scandals and pledging to fix them.
Looking back, Thorp said he would have done some things
differently. “But it’s always easy to
see those things at the end,” he said.
“It’s real easy to look at somebody else’s crisis and know what to
do. It’s a whole different deal when you
have a big bureaucratic organization, trying to make quick decisions and
getting people on board.” And “a big
bureaucratic organization” was a good analogy for UNC’s leadership over the
previous three years of problems.
The academic scandal in the African Studies department
was perhaps the most embarrassing episode to Thorp, but it did have one good
result, he said: that a myth had been deconstructed. “It was a failure of lots of people over a
lot of years to detect it,” he said. “I
think that was fueled by this notion that these kinds of things didn’t happen
here.” As for Carol Folt, the woman who
would be taking over his position in a couple of months, Thorp had a specific
suggestion for her: Watch the TV drama
“Friday Night Lights.” Thorp said he
wished he had watched it five years ago, because an education about athletics
would have come in handy.
*
* *
During
this same timeframe Holden Thorp’s predecessor also spoke up. James Moeser was chancellor at the school
from 2000 to 2008, which incidentally happened to be some of the prime years of
the athletic/academic scandal.
Displaying an obstinate loyalty to his former employer, Moeser voiced
his displeasure over the media’s coverage of the academic scandal that had
involved countless UNC athletes.
In a mid-May interview in the Chapel Hill Magazine, Moeser said: “I’m really angry about (the
media). I think they target people, and
they take pleasure in bringing people down.
I think their real goal here was to remove banners from the Smith
Center.” As the complaints were
seemingly directed at the Raleigh News
and Observer, which had been unyielding in its coverage of UNC’s various
athletic scandals over the previous three years, Moeser’s interview was given
attention in a May 20, 2013, article by the newspaper. The remarks were part of a short article in
which Moeser defended “The Carolina Way,” wrote reporter Dan Kane. That term had become a motto for the
university and had formally been a source of pride and chest-thumping from both
its alums and nonaffiliated sports fans.
It had recently taken a beating amid the various scandals, however.
When Moeser referred to the “banners” in the Smith
Center, he was undoubtedly talking about the three National Championships that
were won by the men’s basketball teams – teams which featured numerous players
who majored in an African and Afro-American Studies department that had been
proven to be rampant with academic fraud.
Despite the apparently obvious connections between those championships
and the proven bogus classes and degrees, Moeser seemed more concerned with
defending an ideal. “I think (the media) has really put a
target on the university,” Moeser had
told the Chapel Hill Magazine, “and
they’ve treated The Carolina Way in a very cynical fashion, trashing it,
really, and indicating The Carolina Way was always just a fiction, a façade we
put in front of misbehavior. I really
resent that. I think The Carolina Way is
genuine, I think it’s real.”
John Drescher, executive editor of the N&O, disputed Moeser’s take on the
media coverage. He provided several
quotes for Kane’s article, and would follow up with an editorial the next
day. In Kane’s May 20 piece, Drescher
said, “We weren’t trying to get anybody, but we were trying to get to the
bottom of what happened at UNC. Most of
our readers understood that and appreciate the digging we did.” Others in the media also supported the N&O’s work. John Robinson, the former editor of The (Greensboro) News & Record, wrote in his blog, “Media disrupted,” that
Moeser didn’t understand the media’s job in an open society. “What actually has happened is that the N&O discovered some rot in the
internal workings at UNC in athletics and academia and, like an infection in
the body, you have to keep going after it to get rid of it all,” Robinson
wrote. “That’s what the N&O has done and is still doing.”
Even some of the faculty at the university said Moeser’s
remarks were misguided, Kane’s article stated.
Michael Hunt, a history professor emeritus, said Moeser may have been
reacting to the criticism leveled by rival fans. “He may be reflecting the embattled feeling
that the administrators are feeling,” Hunt said. “The problem is they are dragging this out,
and I don’t think anybody is saying – I haven’t heard a word saying – ‘Oh, the N&O’s persecuting Chapel Hill.’
Nobody is saying that except for the people who are trying to keep the lid on.” Moeser himself could not be reached for
comment.
A scathing and direct editorial by executive editor John
Drescher came out a day later. In it he
countered Moeser, and said the former chancellor had taken up a tactic usually
preferred by losing politicians: saying “they’re out to get us.” When responding to the accusation that the
media was trying to bring people (and banners) down, Drescher had this to say: “Moeser’s
wrong, obviously. If the media were any
good at targeting people, they would have targeted him. His successor, Holden Thorp, took over before
the scandals broke and ended up taking the heat (and the fall) for problems
that festered under his predecessor.”
Drescher went on to allude to the “Carolina Way” that
Moeser had opined about. “UNC’s
reputation for academic quality and aboveboard athletics has taken a hard
hit. The damage has been made far worse
by the failure of university leaders to admit problems and search relentlessly
for where the trouble began and where it spread.” Finally, the executive editor reached the
heart of the matter by way of a statement that could have been said about
countless UNC, Board of Trustees, and Board of Governors leaders over the past
three years: “But what is Moeser angry
about? Not about what happened or how it
has been handled. He’s angry about what
got reported. He thinks reporting that
seeks to find the extent of the problems is a mean-spirited effort to strip a
proud university of its greatest athletic laurels, the banners from its
national men’s basketball titles. No,
it’s an attempt to do what universities also should do: Seek the truth.”
* * *
More
damaging information would surface less than three weeks later, and again it
was due to the school (finally) releasing public information that they had long
tried to conceal. A set of newly
released emails was the focus of a June 8, 2013, article in the News and Observer, and a key
confirmation was the very close relationship former AFAM chairman Julius
Nyang’oro had with the program that tutored athletes. The emails in question were released by the
university as part of a public records request that had been filed nearly a
year earlier. Inexplicably, none of the
details within the correspondence had shown up in the numerous investigations
conducted since the school confirmed the existence of the fraudulent courses in
May 2012, the paper wrote. That was once
again proof that Martin and Baker Tilley either never checked the emails of
Nyang’oro and Crowder, or that the emails were checked and summarily ignored.
UNC
Chancellor Holden Thorp and other officials had long said that the Academic
Support Program for Student Athletes had not collaborated with anyone in the
AFAM department to create the classes that helped to keep athletes eligible to
play sports. Some of the emails strongly
suggested otherwise. One of the
exchanges was between Nyang’oro and Jaimie Lee, an academic counselor for
athletes. “I failed to mention yesterday
that Swahili 403 last summer was offered as a research paper course,” wrote
Lee. “I meant to (ask), do you think
this may happen again in the future?? If not the summer, maybe the fall?” To which Nyang’oro responded: “Driving a hard bargain; should have known…
:) Will have to think about this, but talk to me….” Nyang’oro did not schedule the Swahili class,
but he did create another one for the summer.
Later that day he emailed Lee informing her of the new class. Those discussed courses had shown up as ones
that should have been taught lecture-style, but had instead been turned into
“paper” classes that only required a term paper at the end.
One
of the university’s long-standing talking points was that non-athletes took the
fraudulent classes as well, which should keep the scandal out of the NCAA’s
realm. School officials said that it
wasn’t only athletes who benefitted from the bogus classes. However, other parts of the email records may
have provided a clue as to why non-athletes were in some of the classes. In early 2005, administrative assistant
Deborah Crowder raised concerns that too many students were seeking to enroll
in independent studies within her department.
She had told one advising official that word about the department’s
independent studies “had sort of gotten into the frat circuit.” That would seem to imply that the preference
was for the courses to be reserved for a very specific subset of UNC’s student
population, because as the records showed, the largest percentage taking the
courses was athletes. Considering
Crowder’s close ties to athletics (and especially the men’s basketball
program), the emails show the distinct possibility that “regular” students
signed up for multiple fraudulent AFAM courses against the preferences of
athletes at UNC.
As usual, school officials largely chose to avoid the
newly uncovered revelations. Attempts by
the N&O to reach Thorp and Karen
Gil, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences (which oversaw advising and the
African Studies department), were unsuccessful.
A UNC spokeswoman, Karen Moon, said the newly released correspondence
contained no “new information” about the Academic Support Program for
Athletes. But Peter Hans, the chairman
of the UNC System Board of Governors, disagreed. “This is additional confirmation that there
was far too cozy a relationship between the academic advisers in the athletic
department and Nyang’oro and Crowder,” Hans
said.
Jaimie Lee still worked for the school’s support program
at the time of the article, but could not be reached for comment. Like Deborah Crowder, Lee also had
interesting connections. Before joining
UNC as a counselor, she worked for a charitable nonprofit founded by former UNC
basketball players, the newspaper reported.
The new emails also showed that a tutor, Suzanne Dirr,
had drawn up “topic” papers for athletes that were virtual outlines of papers
they would have to write for classes.
Interestingly, Dirr submitted her suggested topics to Crowder for
approval – despite the fact that Crowder was not a faculty member, but only an
administrative assistant. Crowder’s
importance to the AFAM department (and the UNC athletic infrastructure)
continued to become more and more evident with each new set of released
information. Dirr died in 2008; Crowder
continued to decline numerous requests for interviews.
Madeline Levine, a former interim dean of the College of
Arts & Sciences, said she was appalled to see how much work the tutors had
done for the athletes in those classes. “It
looks really corrupt, academically corrupt, to me,” said Levine, who is now
retired. She was also troubled by the
tone of the emails between Nyang’oro and various academic counselors. Levine said that while some of it might have
been in jest, it suggested a relationship in which Nyang’oro was doing favors
for the counselors. In one email from
September 2009, Cynthia Reynolds, a former associate director who oversaw
academic support for football players, told Nyang’oro in an email that “I hear
you are doing me a big favor this semester and that I should be bringing you
lots of gifts and cash???????” She also suggested that she and Nyang’oro
talk about students’ assignments via “phone call, meeting or drinks, whichever
you prefer.”
The article reported that on three occasions the records
showed that Nyang’oro and his family were offered football tickets and
food. In one email, Reynolds told the
former AFAM chairman he would be “guest coaching,” which meant that he could
watch the game with the team on the sidelines.
Reynolds left the program in 2010.
An earlier chapter recounted her claim that she had been the victim of
age discrimination. She could not be
reached for the article.
The “no comment” approach continued to be the status quo,
as was the practice of dodging questions by university officials. Beth Bridger, who replaced Reynolds and also
showed up in emails, could not be reached for comment. UNC spokeswoman Karen Moon would not specify
who among the various investigators into the academic fraud scandal had
received the Crowder and Nyang’oro correspondence given to the News and Observer. Moon said it was “considered during past
investigations, in which the university cooperated fully.” She also did not explain why it took nearly a
year to produce the emails for the N&O.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the new emails was
that they did not represent the entire record.
Karen Moon said other correspondence had been withheld because of
student privacy concerns or because it was a personnel matter. The university could have released additional
correspondence with redactions to protect student identities, the newspaper
pointed out, or UNC could make the personnel information public under a
provision in state law that allowed its release to protect the integrity of the
institution. The school chose to not make those efforts, however. That was likely as telling as the actual
emails that were released.
*
* *
Signs had long pointed to a unified “public relations”
front by the school, as officials associated with UNC (and even entities such
as the System’s Board of Governors) had parroted some of the same catch phrases
when commenting on the athletic/academic scandals. An article published by the News and Observer on June 8, 2013,
finally gave some clear evidence as to why those talking points had been so
similar. Public documents that had been
released showed that there had been a dedicated PR and communications effort over
the previous two years that had cost the university more than $500,000.
The breakdown of those bills was as follows: The Fleishman-Hillard firm received $367,000
for 22 months of work; Doug Sosnik, an NBA consultant, received $144,000 for 10
months’ work; and Sheehan Associates of Washington, D.C., received nearly
$20,000 for work performed on “two occasions,” a university official said. As was the case with the nearly one million
dollars that was paid to the Baker Tilley firm during the Martin investigation,
the university’s privately funded foundation paid for all of those PR costs.
Some of the specific correspondence between Sosnik and
the university was especially revealing.
A former counselor to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky
embarrassment, the key message Sosnik wanted reinforced at UNC was that the
school’s scandal was in the past; the university had made reforms and would
become stronger as a result. Records
also showed that UNC administrators, with the help of Sosnik and a member of
Fleishman-Hillard, fought back when Mary Willingham told the News and Observer that school staff had
used no-show classes to keep athletes eligible.
The school administrators and public relations consultants reviewed and
offered edits to a letter to the N&O
editorial page written by Steve Kirschner, an athletics department
spokesman. The letter sought to refute
Willingham’s claims. Furthermore, some
of the correspondence showed that UNC trustee Don Curtis and Athletics Director
Bubba Cunningham didn’t think the NCAA would dig into the academic fraud after
former Governor Jim Martin’s investigation concluded that it was an academic
scandal and not an athletic scandal.
*
* *
According to a June 20, 2013, article in the News and Observer, UNC was handed down a
lenient response from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
Commission on Colleges (SACS), which had earlier been on campus following the
revelation of academic fraud within the AFAM department. It was announced that the school would be
monitored in the future, but not sanctioned.
Other details were that 384 students who took fraudulent classes from
1997 to 2009 would be given the opportunity to “make whole” their academic
degrees. Specific information regarding
the method of completing those degrees was said to be forthcoming.
Some on campus were appalled by the lack of action by the
accrediting agency, the paper noted. “It’s
amazing. I guess the flagship gets off
the hook,” said Mary Willingham, the UNC reading specialist who used to work
with athletes and who had been outspoken about the problems at the school. “For me, it’s getting to the point where
power is so much more important than justice.”
*
* *
As the month of June slowly came to an end, one more
important article was released regarding the academic situation at UNC. A June 29, 2013, piece by N&O reporter Dan Kane focused on the
academic performance by the school’s athletes, and the stark drop that had
happened over the previous several years.
According to recent academic progress statistics from the NCAA, the
paper reported, UNC’s men’s basketball team – at one point the best in the
Atlantic Coast Conference with a near perfect Academic Progress Rate (APR)
score – had fallen to eighth place. The
school’s football team had recently been just a few academic points away from
losing postseason eligibility. Both
teams had just scored their all-time lows on the APR. UNC Athletics Director Bubba Cunningham and
other officials declined to be interviewed for the article. Not surprisingly, the years that UNC’s
basketball and football teams scored well on the APR were ones in which
athletes had been taking dozens of fraudulent classes within the AFAM
department. With that in mind, it could
hardly be considered an unexpected coincidence that the APR score dropped
following the exposure of the university’s athletic/academic scandal.
*
* *
The essential (and unanswered)
questions:
-- Why did the faculty
authors of a July 2012 report allow their wording (in reference to Deborah
Crowder) to be changed?
-- Other than free
tickets and food, did Julius Nyang’oro receive any other gifts from athletic
personnel in exchange for academic favors?
-- Why would Crowder be
concerned that frat students were signing up for AFAM independent studies
courses?
-- Why did athletic
tutor Suzanne Dirr submit paper topics directly to Crowder – who wasn’t even a
faculty member?
-- Why did none of the
school’s prior investigations mention the revealing and damaging email
exchanges conducted by Nyang’oro and/or Crowder?
-- Why did the
university refuse to release the remainder of the Nyang’oro and Crowder emails,
even in redacted form?
