Tarnished Heels - Chapter Eighteen

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?

Tarnished Heels -- Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

Further depth of the academic scandal; Robert Mercer;

Board of Governors; SACS

            Shortly following the late-January retraction by Baker Tilly, an editorial would appear in the News and Observer written by John Drescher.  That piece would be important for a variety of reasons.  It mixed data and facts with numerous hard-hitting statements about the questionable thoroughness of the Martin investigation.  Of equal importance was the identity of the writer himself.  Not only was Drescher the executive editor of the N&O, but he was also a graduate of UNC.  As a result, he had proven himself to be one of the few individuals with any sort of past association with the school who was not afraid to decry the athletic/academic scandals as a series of deplorable acts which had resulted in little to no consequences.

            Drescher’s editorial recounted the events that led Baker Tilly to drop one of its key findings: that athletics officials and academic support officials had raised questions and concerns with the Faculty Committee on Athletics about certain courses.  That had been one of the main presumed “facts” within the Martin report that had tried to free athletics from taking primary blame in the scandal.  However, it was later shown to have never been the case. 

            Prior to the retraction, former Governor Martin had written: “I believe that findings and conclusions should be based on evidence, not hearsay and imagination.”  Drescher’s editorial responded with, “If only that were what Martin’s report did.”  Drescher talked about his past experience as a reporter on the Capitol beat, which coincided with the time when Martin was governor from 1985 to 1993.  Drescher had interviewed Martin several times, and indicated that Martin was smart and capable.  “But he’s an inexperienced investigator,” Drescher wrote, “and it showed in his report.  After athletic department officials told him they had raised red flags with the faculty committee, neither Martin nor Baker Tilly interviewed any of the faculty committee members, except for the NCAA representative.  That’s right: Gov. Martin never talked to the people he blamed for dropping the ball.”

            Drescher’s editorial went on to state that Martin and Baker Tilly were obligated to interview several members of the faculty committee for two primary reasons.  One was to make every effort to get to the truth.  The second was to give members of the committee a chance to respond to charges that they had heard concerns about possible academic abuse.  “There’s no acceptable explanation for why Martin and Baker Tilly didn’t interview these faculty members,” Drescher continued.  “Martin and Baker Tilly seemed more determined to absolve the athletic department of blame than to get to the bottom of what went wrong.”

            Despite members of the UNC System’s Board of Governors not thinking that the retraction damaged the rest of Martin’s findings, UNC Professor Jay Smith felt otherwise.  “The importance of this event cannot be overstated,” Smith wrote in The Herald-Sun of Durham.  “The validity of Martin’s interpretation of UNC’s troubles as ‘not an athletics scandal’ hinged on the anecdote about the FAC; the discrediting of that anecdote undermines the interpretive thrust of the entire report.”

            With Baker Tilley’s retraction, Drescher wrote, Martin had painted himself into a corner.  As noted in the previous chapter (and reiterated in the editorial), the only officials Baker Tilly had found who knew about the fraudulent classes, other than the department head and his assistant, were from the athletics department and the faculty representative to the NCAA.  “In trying to get to the bottom of the scandal,” Drescher said, “it’s helpful to ask the basic questions… What did he know?  When did he know it?  I’d pose a third question: When he knew, what did he do about it?  Martin and Baker Tilly tried to show that the UNC athletic department was pure.  Instead, cornered by the facts, they’ve unintentionally shown that athletic department officials suspected academic fraud years ago and did little or nothing about it.”

* * *

            Months later the true cost of the Martin investigation would be revealed.  According to a copy of UNC’s agreement with Baker Tilly, the firm was to provide five employees at a combined cost of $1,520 per hour for the work.  Martin himself had reportedly volunteered his services to the university, only being reimbursed for approximately $5,000 in expenses.  Baker Tilly, however, had charged UNC a total of $941,000.  Karen Moon, a university spokeswoman, would later tell the News and Observer that all of the money paid to the firm had come from a university foundation that took in private donations, so no taxpayer dollars had been spent.  And despite the fact that Baker Tilly had been forced to retract one of the most vital claims in the entire report that had aimed to absolve athletics of any wrongdoing, Moon said: “Their analysis was independent, objective and thorough.”

* * *

            Just as Baker Tilly was retracting its earlier backing of that key component of the Martin report, updated data on the scandal was released regarding the information that was uncovered.  In a January 25, 2013, article in the News and Observer, it was revealed that athletes who took a subset of 172 fraudulent classes within the AFAM department had an average grade of 3.56, which was between a B-plus and A-minus.  Those classes had also accounted for 512 total grade changes during the time period that had been examined.  The period covered in the new data did not extend prior to the fall of 2001, because the report indicated that information did not exist in electronic format beforehand.  In all, 216 suspect courses were identified back to 1997, with 560 grade changes that lacked proper authorization. 

            The extremely high average grade for athletes in the fraudulent courses should have raised a major red flag.  The transcript of Julius Peppers showed that his grades in AFAM courses were considerably higher than in his other subject areas, and essentially had kept him eligible to participate in sports.  An average grade of 3.56 amongst athletes for over a decade likely had similar effects for some – if not all – other cases involving football and basketball players.  Yet once again, that line of investigation was inexplicably not pursued by Martin or Baker Tilly.

* * *

            On February 7, 2013, the UNC System Board of Governors’ special panel released its own report.  It largely accepted the findings of Martin and Baker Tilly, even after the vital retraction and the updated data that had been released.  The report was met with criticism by some BOG members, and other details emerged from the findings that added more questions to an already ambiguous scandal.

            Articles were released from various local sources on February 7, including wral.com, wncn.com, and several by the News and Observer.  Multiples quotes and valuable pieces of information came forward as a result.  The special panel had been selected by the Board of Governors itself, which as previously noted had a heavy percentage of UNC graduates as members.  In fact, one portion of the report seemed to echo the sentiment that many of UNC’s leaders had been loudly stating over the previous six-plus months: that they would try and make sure nothing of the sort ever happened in the future.  “This panel acknowledges the open question about what might have occurred years ago,” the report said, “but believes that it is immaterial to its focus on current practices in both Academic Affairs and the (academic support program) that reduce the risk for any such anomalies occurring in the future.”  Essentially, they conceded that they didn’t know why the past indiscretions happened, and they weren’t overly concerned with those reasons, either.

            Some of the same types of contradictory remarks that had dotted the Martin report also showed up in the BOG panel’s report.  In the wral.com article, it stated that the panel told the rest of the board that it may never know if athletes were steered to bogus classes, but added that there was no evidence to support a conspiracy between the athletics department and the AFAM department.  Louis Bissette, the board member who led the panel, said: “We are not an investigative body.  We are a review panel.”  That would lead to the same unanswered questions that plagued the Martin report.  Why not look at past email and phone records to determine if there had been collusion between athletics and academics?  And if the BOG (and apparently Martin and his team) were not investigative bodies, then why not hire a real investigative team with experience in that realm? 

            There were other factual and data-driven inconsistencies.  Bissette was told that there were no records that could show how many freshman non-athletes were able to enroll in and complete African Studies courses designed for upper-level students.  As detailed in earlier chapters, past transcripts of UNC students would have clearly shown that distinction.  So in that regard there definitely were records that could have provided that data – though it would have been a time-consuming process to accumulate the information.  Apparently that was not the meticulous type of approach the panel wished to take, even though it would have provided accurate results.

            Board of Governors member Jim Deal called the scandal embarrassing and inexcusable.  “The chairman had a fiefdom and he was the king and nobody ever looked at what the king was doing,” said Deal.  However, he stopped short of questioning the findings of the panel’s review.  Other board members were not as forgiving, though.  Member Fred Eshelman of Wilmington expressed his incredulous doubts by saying: “This stuff was propagated for 14 years basically by two people without additional collusion?”

Burley Mitchell, a former State Supreme Court Chief Justice, was even more outspoken.  According to the wncn.com article, he blasted the consultants who provided much of the legwork for Martin’s report, saying they relied on incomplete statistical evidence and failed to interview key people involved in the scandal.  “It was inconceivable that it was two people who did this.  You have 172 fake classes.  Forty-five percent of the students in there are athletes.  That is way disproportionate for their number on campus, which was less than five percent who are athletes.  Somehow they are being directed to those courses,” Mitchell said.  “There is, to my mind, a good deal of evidence throughout this campus there were a large number of people, particularly in athletics, who knew that these courses did not amount to anything.”

            Mitchell continued by alluding to the allegations that academic counselors had steered athletes to certain courses.  “It was clearly also an athletic problem to an extreme,” he said.  In support of Mitchell’s point, an article appeared in the New York Times during the same timeframe.  In it, former UNC player Michael McAdoo alleged that he and other athletes got special treatment while at UNC.  According to the article (and a recap later published by wralsportsfan.com), McAdoo claimed that despite wanting a different major, counselors at UNC selected AFAM for him because it worked around the Tar Heels’ practice schedule.  He said that he was “assigned” a Swahili course, never attended it, and never met the professor.  That was also the class where (with the help of tutor Jennifer Wiley) he plagiarized a paper and lost his NCAA eligibility.

            A spokesperson at UNC said in reply to McAdoo’s claims, “Number one, I cannot comment on any student’s academic record.  Number two, I cannot comment on Michael’s situation because of ongoing litigation.  As far as the counselors, I would refer you to the Martin report for what counselors did or didn’t do.”  McAdoo’s disdain for the university and how they treated him was clear, though.  He was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I would still like to get a college degree someday.  But not at the University of North Carolina.  They just wasted my time.”

            McAdoo’s assertions were yet another piece of anecdotal evidence of counselors steering athletes to fraudulent courses, and they supported the stance of Burley Mitchell and others that the reviews by Martin and the BOG special panel had not delved deep enough into the issues in question.  When asked whether the NCAA should be investigating above and beyond what the Martin report and the BOG panel had reported, Mitchell said, “Hell, yes.”  Steve Kirschner, a UNC spokesman, said after the panel’s report: “We do not comment on the specific details of our daily operations.”

* * *

            More damaging information was revealed on February 7, 2013, which dealt with what at first appeared to be a side note of the Board of Governors’ report, but eventually raised more serious questions.  The limelight was once again directed back towards some of the fraudulent courses, and the past lack of action that leaders within the school had taken in terms of identifying and potentially stopping the offering of those courses.  The News and Observer reported that according to university documents, the former director for Academic Support for Athletics had been instructed in previous years to track independent study courses to make sure there were no improprieties.  But Robert Mercer, that former director, had apparently not followed through with that task.

            The initial request of Mercer had been made by the faculty committee following an independent study scandal at Auburn University in 2006-07.  The committee had wanted to be sure that something similar was not happening at UNC.  However, officials from both the school and the overall UNC System said that they could find no evidence that Mercer had followed up.  “He was asked to provide reports, but he did not provide written reports, is all I can tell you,” said BOG member Louis Bissette.  “It’s another failure.”

            As thoroughly discussed in the previous chapter, Mercer was one of four officials with athletics ties who claimed that he raised concerns to the Faculty Athletics Committee in 2002 and 2006 about independent studies classes.  That claim was at the center of the Martin report’s findings and overall validity.  The News and Observer’s Dan Kane pointedly asked in a February 7, 2012, article:  If Mercer was concerned about those classes, why hadn’t he been tracking them as he had been asked?  Chancellor Holden Thorp said, “That should have been followed up on.  I wish it had been, because we would have caught all of this stuff.”  As was often the case with UNC employees during the ongoing scandal, Mercer could not be reached for comment.

            Thorp said he didn’t know whether Mercer’s apparent lack of action on the issue of the  independent studies casted doubt on Mercer’s assertion that he raised concerns about them, the N&O article stated.  Burley Mitchell, the Board of Governors’ member who had been so outspoken about the lack of a true investigation into the university’s issues, said the revelation made Mercer’s assertion look like a “smokescreen.”

* * *

            The university attracted negative attention from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) several days later.  According to a February 12, 2013, article in the News and Observer, SACS was an agency that monitored the academic quality of schools and colleges across the South.  Its board could issue colleges a warning, or worse, probation.  If a school on probation did not clearly address problems, it could lose accreditation.

            In a notice from the accrediting agency, UNC had been told that it must ensure the legitimacy of degrees awarded to an unknown number of graduates who took bogus classes going back to the 1990’s.  One possible solution proposed by SACS president Belle Wheelan would have been for the school to offer those graduates with free courses to take the place of the fraudulent ones.  When asked why any former student would return for an extra course, Wheelan said: “Integrity.  Honesty.  Fairness.  You know, all those things we like to think they learned as part of that academic program in the first place.”  A team assembled by the accrediting agency was scheduled to visit UNC in April.

            As an embarrassing byproduct of the warning from SACS, approximately two weeks later UNC officials confirmed that administrators were performing visual inspections of classes across campus to make sure they were taking place.  The spot checks were part of the university’s efforts to assure SACS that there would be no need for a sanction against the school in the wake of its various academic fraud scandals.

* * *

            As March got underway, there were finally some minor rumblings from UNC’s faculty with regards to the stigma the academic scandals had placed on the university.  According to a March 8, 2013, article in the News and Observer, Professor Jay Smith was again at the vocal forefront.  As a leader of a professors’ coalition known as the Athletics Reform Group, Smith had spoken at a Faculty Council meeting and called for a multi-year, wide-ranging series of town hall meetings to “debate openly and honestly” the university’s commitment to NCAA Division I athletics.  In calling for a faculty-led debate, the news article reported, Smith read an email from an unnamed colleague that ran down a series of events that began as a scandal in the football program and led to the discovery of major academic fraud. 

            At the same meeting, Chancellor Thorp had announced that an outside panel led by Association of American Universities President Hunter Rawlings would hold its first meeting on April 19.  Thorp had asked Rawlings to lead an effort to examine the balance of athletics and academics at the school.  That led to tense moments during the meeting, however, as the article stated that Thorp bristled when Jay Smith suggested the Rawlings panel was “not going to serve the function that most of us hoped.”

            Some professors at the meeting took issue with Smith’s overall proposal, suggesting that faculty had been concerned all along and the administration had launched reforms to deal with the problems uncovered.  However, the past record of printed comments seemed to speak for itself: other than Smith and Mary Willingham, virtually no other UNC faculty members had been willing to publicly decry the prominent role the school’s athletics programs had played in the ongoing scandals.  Greg Copenhaver, a biology professor, argued that Smith cast athletes in a bad light, even though the vast majority of which were “good actors.”  Almost as if scripted, Copenhaver then suggested that the faculty focus on moving forward, rather than looking back – one of the oft-repeated PR sentiments from those at UNC who seemed to want to avoid uncovering any dark athletic secrets of the past.

* * *

The essential (and unanswered) questions:

-- Through the use of nearly one million dollars from private donations, had UNC essentially paid Baker Tilly to try and absolve athletics from primary responsibility in its academic scandal?

-- Considering that athletes received an average grade of nearly an A-minus in 172 fraudulent courses, why hadn’t further research been conducted to determine the effects of those fictitious grades on those athletes’ eligibility?

-- Like Martin and his team, why had the Board of Governors also neglected to closely scrutinize the email and phone records of Julius Nyang’oro and Deborah Crowder?

-- Once the BOG conceded that they were not an “investigative body” and were unable to uncover the answers to key questions (just as Martin and his team had been unable to do), why wouldn’t they insist on the hiring of a true, skilled investigator to look into those matters?

-- What possible motive would Robert Mercer, at the time the director for Academic Support for Athletics, have for failing to track independent study courses as he had been asked to do?

            

Tarnished Heels -- Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Academic fraud; AFAM grade changes; Deborah Crowder

            In May of 2012 UNC released the report from a faculty-led internal investigation into the school’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM).  According to a May 4, 2012, article by investigative reporter Dan Kane of the Raleigh News and Observer, evidence had been found of academic fraud involving more than 50 classes that ranged from no-show professors to unauthorized grade changes.  The report would give many details, but also seemingly leave just as many important questions unanswered. 

            According to Kane’s article, one of the no-show classes was a Swahili course taken by former football player Michael McAdoo.  That same course had earlier been at the center of the NCAA claims that McAdoo had received impermissible tutoring, which then led to the discovery of a paper being heavily plagiarized.  The vast majority of the suspect AFAM classes were found to have been taught by former department chairman Julius Nyang’oro.  Along with the release of the report, the university also said that Nyang’oro would be retiring effective July 1.  According to Nancy Davis, the Associate Vice Chancellor for University Relations, “Professor Nyang’oro offered to retire, and we agreed that was in the best interest of the department, the college and the university.”

            The report attempted to make it clear that there was no evidence that student athletes received more favorable treatment (via the suspect courses) than students who were not athletes.  In fact, this would become a common sentiment to be proclaimed by UNC leadership in the months and years to come, and was the school’s main argument that its athletic teams should not be punished due to the academic fraud: because non-athletes were part of the classes as well.  Possible insight into why non-athletes were in those classes would eventually be revealed, but not for over a year after the release of the May 2012 report.  As such, that information will be discussed in a later chapter.

            A direct line from Kane’s article stated, “The findings were so serious that the university consulted with the district attorney and the SBI about investigating forgery allegations, as some professors said their signatures were forged in documents certifying that they had taught some of the classes in question.  Professors also said they had not authorized grade changes for students that the department submitted to the registrar’s office.”

            An immediate set of questions would arise from the lines in the above paragraph.  The most obvious dealt with the grade changes.  For whom were they changed, and what were the new/old grades?  And what effects, if any, did it have on those students’ overall grade point averages?  If they were athletes, did the changes allow them to keep their eligibility in a particular sport?  More than a year and a half later, the school has still not revealed that information.

* * *

            According to the report, law enforcement officials declined to investigate because they did not think the forgeries rose to the level of criminal activity.  What was apparently not considered, however, was the fact that some of the forgeries dealt with classes that were “on record” with the school, and where students received grades.  They were part of the monetary framework of the university’s financial and bookkeeping structure.  Yet no one taught them – since the professors’ said signatures were forged.  Did anyone receive the pay for having taught those classes, even though no “teaching” took place?

            Jonathan Hartlyn and William L. Andrews were the two senior faculty administrators who conducted the investigation.  In a joint statement they said, “We are deeply disturbed by what we have learned in the course of our review.  Our review has exposed numerous violations of professional trust, affecting the relationship of faculty and students and the relationships among faculty colleagues in this department.  These violations have undermined the educational experience of a number of students, have the potential to generate unfounded doubt and mistrust toward the department and faculty, and could harm the academic reputation of the university.”

            Information that would become extremely important in the future was that the timeframe covered in the report only went back as far as the summer of 2007, and ended with the summer of 2011.  A reason for this was given in a later interview by Chancellor Holden Thorp, who said the course review did not go back before summer 2007 because the university wanted to obtain the most accurate records and recollections available.  Another possible explanation, though obviously never stated by the university, was that the summer of 2007 coincided with the first time the recruits of former football coach Butch Davis were on campus.  Furthermore, Davis was fired in late July of 2011, showing that his tenure at the school essentially mirrored the time period UNC chose to focus its AFAM report.  Many in the social media world would suggest, perhaps rightfully so, that the school was attempting to pin all of its academic troubles on the now-ended Davis regime and his football players

* * *

            Much more valuable insight was provided via the report and the aforementioned article by Dan Kane.  It showed that the AFAM department’s long-time administrator, Deborah Crowder, would have overseen much of the course scheduling and grade recording.  She retired in September 2009 and declined to be interviewed for the internal investigation.  The newspaper reported that she made $36,130 a year before retiring, but she could also not be reached for further comment by the newspaper.  Like the pattern that followed the initial mentioning of Nyang’oro’s name a year earlier, Crowder would also soon become a much more central figure in the academic scandal.

            One of the classes that was deemed a “no-show” course was the 400-level class where Marvin Austin received a B-plus during his first summer on campus.  Kane’s article noted that Nyang’oro had been unable to produce a syllabus for that class, “Bioethics in Afro-American Studies,” or the Swahili class that Michael McAdoo had taken.  That was another red flag, according to the school’s report, because documents provided by other professors teaching similar courses focused on reading and writing in Swahili, not writing papers about Swahili culture in English, as McAdoo had submitted. 

            More problems arose when Nyang’oro told the university investigators that he did not teach the aforementioned Swahili class, yet the plagiarized paper McAdoo submitted listed Nyang’oro’s name as the course professor.  The investigation found it was one of nine classes in which there was no evidence that any professor “actually supervised the course and graded the work, although grade rolls were signed and submitted.”  And as stated earlier, other professors who were listed on grade rolls for those classes said their names were forged on course documents.  McAdoo was one of 59 students taking those classes.  Yet again, an obvious question was left unasked and thus unanswered: who were the other students?  Were they athletes whose eligibility was somehow affected by the fake grades?

            The report also found a “strikingly high” percentage of cases in Nyang’oro’s classes in which temporary grades were converted to permanent ones.  Several other faculty members said they had not authorized grade changes for students.  It was not detailed in the report whether the newer, “permanent” grades were higher than the “temporary” ones, despite this being a seemingly obvious set of data to seek in order to uncover motive.  And once again, the issue of athletic eligibility was completely ignored by the report – despite the clear evidence of Marvin Austin and Michael McAdoo benefitting from taking the classes, McAdoo’s plagiarism withstanding.  As detailed when discussing Austin’s transcript in Chapter Five, a 2.0 grade point average was required to be in good academic standing at the school.  If temporary grades were later changed to permanent ones, and the ensuing result was that an athlete’s GPA was bumped above the 2.0 threshold, then clear intent would be established.  Again, none of that was addressed in the report.  Whether the investigators looked into the matter and then chose to not include it, based on what they possibly discovered, is unknown.

            Indeed, the report did not cast any blame on the athletics department.  However, information obtained by the News and Observer showed the AFAM’s independent study courses were popular with athletes, and that Nyang’oro was often teaching them.  Such courses had drawn suspicion in the past due to the sometimes lax attendance and work policies, and athletic programs at other universities had gotten into trouble based on some independent study courses, according to the N&O.

            In all, nine courses from the summer 2007 through summer 2011 timeframe were found to be aberrant, meaning there was evidence that students completed written work, submitted it to the department and received grades, but there was no evidence that the faculty member listed as instructor of record or any other faculty member actually supervised the course and graded the work.  Those nine courses had a collective total of 59 registered students, according to the report.  Furthermore, an additional 43 courses with a collective total of 599 registered students were either aberrant or were taught irregularly.  The latter meant that the instructor provided an assignment and evidently graded the resultant paper, but engaged in limited or no classroom or other instructional contact with students.

* * *

            The AFAM’s long-time administrator, Deborah Crowder, was earlier mentioned as being the person who would have overseen much of the course scheduling and grade recording within the department.  Crowder began working at the university in 1979, and retired in 2009.  Details would emerge that showed a very close relationship between Crowder and the men’s basketball program.  She had been in a long-standing relationship with former basketball player Warren Martin, who played on the 1982 National Championship team.  At the time the various fraudulent classes were being revealed, Crowder also had a Facebook social media page.  When the report was publicly revealed her Facebook page was still open to public view, and her “friends” list contained a staggering collection of former UNC men’s basketball players – many of whom had played on past National Championship teams. 

Included were:

-- Wayne Ellington (played from 2006-09, and was a member of the 2009 National Championship team)

-- Bobby Frasor (2006-09, and a member of the 2009 National Championship team)

-- Tyler Hansbrough (2005-09, and a member of the 2009 National Championship team)

-- Quentin Thomas (2004-08, and a member of the 2005 National Championship team)

-- Wes Miller (2004-07, and a member of the 2005 National Championship team)

-- Byron Sanders (2003-06, and a member of the 2005 National Championship team)

-- David Noel (2002-06, and a member of the 2005 National Championship team)

-- Rashad McCants (2002-05, and a member of the 2005 National Championship team)

-- (The wife of) Jawad Williams (2001-05, and a member of the 2005 National Championship team)

-- (The wife of) Jackie Manuel (2001-05, and a member of the 2005 National Championship team)

-- Will Johnson (1999-03)

-- Terrence Newby (1997-00)

-- Ademola Okulaja (1995-99)

-- Donald Williams (1992-95, and a member of the 1993 National Championship team)

-- Derrick Phelps (1990-94, and a member of the 1993 National Championship team)

-- Kevin Salvadori (1990-94, and a member of the 1993 National Championship team)

-- J.R. Reid (1986-89)

-- David Popson (1984-87)

            One other name of note stood out amongst Crowder’s “friends” list: Kay Thomas.  Thomas was a long-time secretary of the UNC men’s basketball team.  According to a 2012 interview with the website keepingitheel.com, Thomas worked for the basketball program under Coach Dean Smith until he retired.

Also of significant interest was the emerging revelation that Crowder was very close to Burgess McSwain, a long-time academic adviser to UNC’s men’s basketball team.  A story that originally appeared in the Chapel Hill News in February of 2004 detailed many of McSwain’s accomplishments involving academics and the school’s basketball team.  There was even a quote given by Julius Nyang’oro in the article.  It followed a lead-in that proclaimed that McSwain’s efforts and skills as a teacher had won the respect of numerous UNC faculty members who regularly teach student athletes.  Nyang’oro’s remarks immediately followed, part of which stated, “Burgess has a clear sense of what a teacher needs to do to convey the key concepts that need to be understood.  She is another transmission belt in the teaching process.”  In fact, that specific topic, “faculty members who regularly teach student athletes,” was immediately changed following Nyang’oro’s quotes, leaving him as the only faculty member featured in the section.  Later in the article McSwain was quoted as saying, “I tell people who ask me that it’s not a sham at Carolina.  I can’t say what happens at other schools, but at Carolina, while we may spoon-feed them a little bit, they go in and take their own exams and write their own papers.  We don’t do their work for them.”  Whether she was aware of the fraudulent activities within the AFAM department that benefitted basketball players is unknown.  McSwain died on July 9, 2004, after a long illness.

According to information that would surface later in 2012 via an article from the Charlotte Observer, Crowder had received $100,000 and some Hummel figurines in 2008 from the estate of Burgess McSwain’s father.  The payment was said to have arisen from a “close” friendship Crowder had with Ms. McSwain.  The money and items were reported to be in exchange for taking care of the father’s dogs. 

* * *

            More notable information from the AFAM investigative report surfaced just a few days later via another News and Observer article penned by Dan Kane, which made heavy use of statistics gleaned from the documents.  It revealed that football and basketball players accounted for nearly four of every ten students enrolled in fifty-four classes at the heart of the academic fraud investigation.  The actual number of athletically-associated enrollments might have even been higher, as trainers, volunteers, and other “support” members of the teams were not identified – only those who were official sports participants.  While perhaps shocking to the general public, there were signs beforehand that should have hinted at the news, what with Austin and McAdoo’s earlier transgressions, and then Crowder’s close ties with the basketball program. 

Crowder’s presence brought up another huge red flag once the percentage of basketball enrollees was revealed, and led to a topic that few in the media (and none at UNC or even the NCAA) seemed to want to tackle: As previously mentioned, there were unauthorized grade changes.  For whom were they changed?  Were they for football and/or basketball players?  And if so, how did it affect the GPA’s and eventual eligibility of those players?  Someone at the university – and likely the AFAM department – changed those grades.  A fair line of reasoning to follow up on would be to look at people who had connections and/or a vested interest in the athletic programs.  Deborah Crowder unequivocally fit those parameters, especially with the basketball program.  Yet the grades of past basketball players were never looked into by the university – or if they were, it was never publicly acknowledged by the university.  As explained in an earlier chapter, if players were found to have participated while ineligible, then victories would have to be forfeited.  The UNC men’s basketball team won national titles in the very recent years of 2009 and 2005.  It also won a title in 1993, which just happened to be the year after Julius Nyang’oro took over as the chairman of the AFAM department.   And it won a title in 1982, a team on which Deborah Crowder’s boyfriend, Warren Martin, played.  Yet no questions were asked regarding this massive set of coinciding and suggestive information.

According to the News and Observer’s article, university officials say they found no evidence that the suspect classes were part of a plan between Nyang’oro and the athletics department for eligibility-maintaining purposes.  And once again the same reasoning was given that Hartlyn and Andrews had used in their report: Student athletes were treated no differently in the classes than students who were not athletes.  It should be noted that in the summer of 2011 the university hired a Raleigh public relations firm to help with their handling of the ongoing scandal.  As time would go on, more and more people associated with UNC would repeat some of the same phrases over and over again, emphasizing points that would appear to convey less wrongdoing on the university’s part, and thus hopefully keep the NCAA from returning to the school – such as the “student athletes vs. non-student athletes” technicality.

* * *

Former State Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, at the time an attorney, was quoted as saying, “These kids are putting in enormous amounts of time, and in at least some of the sports that are very physically demanding, they are missing a number of classes because of conflicts, and then if they are a marginal student to begin with, you’ve got to send them to Professor Nyang’oro’s class.  I think the academic counselors realized that and the tutors realized it and frankly the folks up the food chain for the most part recognized it.  But nobody wants to rock the boat because it’s big money.”

Kane’s article went on to further break down the reported enrollments in the suspect classes.  Of the 686 students, 246 of the enrollments, or 36 percent, were football players, and 23 enrollments, or three percent, were basketball players, according to UNC.  Kane went on to point out that football and basketball players accounted for less than one percent of the total undergraduate enrollment – about 120 of the more than 18,500 undergraduate students on campus – yet they accounted for nearly 40 percent of the enrollments in fraudulent classes. 

Some in the social media realm tried to immediately downplay basketball’s involvement, pointing to the relatively low “three percent” statistic (23 enrollments).  That argument was statistically flawed, however.  The short timeframe of the school’s investigative report into AFAM classes was from 2007 to 2011.  During that same time period, there were 26 total scholarship players who participated on the four men’s basketball teams that covered the same timeframe.  There are several counterarguments that could shed a different light on that data:  If each of those 23 basketball AFAM enrollees only took one fraudulent class apiece, then all but three men’s basketball members from 2007 to 2011 would retroactively lose their eligibility (assuming the academic fraud was appropriately acted upon by the NCAA, or even the university itself).  If a group of players took two classes apiece, that would still mean that at least 11 players would retroactively lose their eligibility – 42 percent of the players from 2007 to 2011.  In either scenario, the team would be forced to vacate all of its victories during that timeframe – including the 2009 National Championship.  So once again, it became increasingly apparent why the university was unwilling to dig any deeper into the AFAM fraud.  The basketball team and its past accomplishments were coming close to being placed at the center of the microscope, and those glories were as much a part UNC’s image as any academic reputation had ever been.

* * *

As more dissecting of the university’s investigative report continued, even more questions appeared to be left unanswered.  According to the May 7, 2012, article in the News and Observer, university officials could not say why no one brought the suspect classes to their attention before the previous summer.  Jonathan Hartlyn and William Andrews, the two UNC academic officials who conducted the probe, did not interview students for the report – despite the fact that they must have known all of the students’ names who were in the classes, as they reportedly had open access to all past records.  However, Nancy Davis, a university spokeswoman, said the university’s counsel, Leslie Strohm, and its former faculty athletics representative, Jack Evans, did talk to students.  Inexplicably, those interviews were not reflected in the report.  As noted before, other information that was not reflected in the report was for whom specific grades were altered.  While the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) would prevent the report from naming specific students, it could have very easily indicated whether the grades of athletes were changed – and what effect it had on those athletes’ overall GPA.  But once again, that was not pursued by the report’s investigators or by the university as a whole.

            Tom Ross, the UNC system president and a graduate of UNC’s School of Law, stated a theme that would be oft-repeated in the coming months by those closely associated with the university: It was time to look forward, and not backwards.  He said in a statement that he saw no need to look further into the academic improprieties.  “I believe that this was an isolated situation,” Ross said, “and that the campus has taken appropriate steps to correct problems and put additional safeguards in place.”  On what information he was basing his assumption that it was an isolated situation, however, was certainly unclear.  Hannah Gage, chairman of the UNC System’s Board of Governors and another UNC graduate, said she would not know if the board would be seeking more information until she had talked to others.  As pointed out in Chapter Two, UNC graduates held a significantly higher percentage of the BOG seats than any other university in the 16-institution system.

* * *

The essential (and unanswered) questions:

-- Who changed the grades for the students? 

-- Who forged the professors’ signatures? 

-- Who was ultimately paid for the various classes where the teacher was “unknown?”

-- How many athletes took part in the fraudulent classes, and for which sports? 

-- Did those grades affect their GPA’s, and if deemed impermissible, then retroactively their eligibility? 

-- Had the matter been pursued, would team wins need to vacated, even if it meant national championships? 

-- Even though Deborah Crowder retired in 2009, the fraudulent AFAM anomalies continued for at least two more years.  Was Nyang’oro solely responsible?  If not, who else played a role in the improprieties now that Crowder was gone?

-- Why did the university and its on-staff investigators refuse to ask the above questions and seek answers in a manner that would appear to uphold the honorable and high standards it had long claimed to hold for the institution?