The details of an academic scandal at the University of North Carolina have been known for some time, and Julius Nyang-oro, the former longstanding head of the Afro and African-American Studies Department at UNC, recently was indicted for accepting payment with the intent to defraud the university. The university appears comfortable with the position that the entire blame for the scandal falls on the heads of Nyang-oro and the retired department manager, Deborah Crowder, despite the fact that roughly half of the students involved in the bogus classes were student-athletes at UNC.
Here is an excellent summary of this matter.
The national management consulting firm that worked on this matter for UNC determined that athletes made up about half of the total enrollments in the bogus classes over the years, and the institution has concluded that given the wide scope of the academic fraud involved, the matter should not be considered an athletics problem so much as an institutional academic problem. That is certainly not a ringing endorsement for UNC, and one wonders what percent of enrollments in bogus classes by student-athletes would be sufficient to label this an athletics problem. Nonetheless, the NCAA also appears to have accepted the position that the academic fraud was so broad that even though a significant number of athletes profited from the phony classes, this was not an athletics issue. Please see this article for a different perspective.
Of course, nothing does more to undermine the notion that an academically prestigious institution such as UNC can thrive and remain true to its core values while participating in big-time college athletics than an academic scandal involving that institution’s student-athletes. Over the years, the NCAA has emphasized that academic scandals involving student-athletes would be dealt with harshly by the association’s enforcement department. That does not appear to be the current message from the NCAA, at least as regards UNC.
The link to appropriate NCAA jurisdiction in this matter is clear, given that many student-athletes were involved. In fact, the most recent phantom class acknowledged by the university, identified as “AFAM 280” and scheduled in the summer of 2011, consisted of 19 students. Of those, 18 were current UNC football players at the time of the course and one was a former UNC football player. Yet as this article notes, the NCAA appears to be taking a relatively passive view of the developments. It does not take a cynic to suggest that it is possible that the young men were prompted to enroll in this phony class (and other such classes) by a person or persons connected to the university’s athletics department. That would seem to be an interesting line of inquiry, but to date it appears that the “bad guys” will be limited to Nyang-oro and Crowder, former department chairman and former department manager, respectively, neither of whom is still employed by UNC.
Perhaps the NCAA is gun-shy following the pushback it received on many fronts related to its penalties against Penn State or because of the public criticism related to its enforcement missteps in the University of Miami case. Nonetheless, the organization has some basic principles to maintain, and a fairly logical one is that athletes are not supposed to receive favorable treatment academically. Given what has come to light in the UNC situation, it is fair to ask why the NCAA has not been more aggressive in this situation.
So there the matter lies. We are left to shake our heads and wonder how such a thing could happen at one of America’s finest public institutions, and how so many athletes found their way into these phony classes. I would be more willing to accept the argument that academic cheating was so rampant at UNC for so many years in the AFAM department that athletes were able to find their way to these phony classes with no intervention from anyone connected to the athletics department except for the fact that, as noted earlier, all 19 students in AFAM 280 were in fact UNC football players at one point.
This article presents a harsh perspective on this matter. I hope there is much more to this case than has been presented publicly. It is essential that all NCAA member institutions feel that for better or worse, they are being treated equally by the NCAA, and the UNC scandal does not appear to support the goal of equal treatment.
Thoughts? Please contact me at mgilleran@scu.edu. Thanks.