tarred ones going to "skate" on academic scandal?

Scott Free- article in Vice Sports
Looks like the Thesaurus entry for NCAA continues to expand: joke, corrupt, unabashedly elitist...

By taking Roy's first championship team off the table this looks like a warning ticket and a " get that muffler fixed pretty quick.'

That team had about 10 scholarship players in the AFAM Studies program. That major offered several paper classes at the time. It seems manageable to go over ten transcripts for a few years to class by class, dig up grade books, attendance records, the papers, and even without subpoena power lean on a few people, to see how many bogus credit hours were awarded and whether the grades were inflated ( a little rounding up ,no shock for jocks, or insanely an " A" for a " D" paper ). If there was ghostwriting or "recycling " of prior papers it should not be that difficult to find.

Maybe all the players in question did college work for every class and earned their degrees? If so , with the information we have about AFAM, fairness to them requires confirming that they did.

Dropping that relatively narrow inquiry at this point seems to be the NCAA's way of saying, " we know we are a joke, and you know we are a joke and now, for the record , we acknowledge that we know that everybody knows that we will not go after big name revenue sport programs for academic fraud."

"now, for the record , we acknowledge that we know that everybody knows that we will not go after big name revenue sport programs for academic fraud."

Unless your Head Coach is named Larry Brown.
Or you have African recruits (who are performing at a MORE than satisfactory level in College courses) that you have to make sure they passed African 6th grade.

Not a darned thing I can do about it.....but MAN, does it "chap my hide."

I cannot rationalize actual UNC student athletes squealing.....and everyone denies it.

Looks like the NCAA is going to punish North Carolina after all: NC punishment
I mean they're going to punish the state of North Carolina, not actually do anything to the cheating athletics department. So NCAA thinks bathroom rules = bad, rampant academic fraud = meh?

www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/writer...university-in-danger

Nothing is ever going to happen, academically or athletically, no matter what is written.

Hello Gov--

You don't think this "accreditation" issue isn't substantial?

The NCAA is proving to be a joke.....I doubt that accrediting boards take these allegations (facts?) so lightly.

I work at a university and the faculty and leadership are constantly working on maintaining accreditation. A friend works at a private high school and THEY are constantly working on keeping their accreditation. It's a big deal.

If this was happening at KU, I'd be sick/mad/embarrassed.

Hey WG.

I didn't state it isn't substantial, it should definitely be.

I just happen to believe that either way, nothing of any consequence will happen here in Chapel Hill. I would say that the majority of the people that I have talked with, where this subject comes up, believe that the entire matter is overblown and in the end it will disappear from the public eye and quietly die out.

Embarrassment and mad are not even on the minds of people here. The rational from their supporters is that "everyone does it", so it's not a big deal. The arrogance level is strong with this university.

My bad for putting words coming out of your keyboard.....

I guess I had forgotten that you are "in da hood" of tar.

WOW, everybody does it, huh?

I think EVERYBODY may require mass quantities of study time, tutoring, whatever to help keep the little darlings eligible.....but, I don't think EVERYBODY takes it THIS far.

I can only come to one conclusion - the NCAA has to put the lid back on this can of worms.

The UNC 19 year fiasco may be the worst case ever seen, but I'll bet there's a whole bunch of "you hammer us, and we drag every other school down with us" coming out of the UNC president's office.

I have personal knowledge of certain classes at KU (I may have taken a few myself) that were filled with athletes, and which required little to no real work (gemstones, intro to film/jazz, coaching of softball, personal life planning, HDFL, etc.). I suspect every school has these classes, and UNC is saying if you get us, then you better get others. This doesn't come close to UNC level, but UNC will use it to threaten the NCAA.

The NCAA is closing this case with as little fanfare and penalties as possible, and hoping it goes away. Ultimately UNC will get away with rampant and egregious academic fraud. And the NCAA will forever be proven a joke.

Rats! I didn't take gemstones or the others.....maybe a couple of those cudda padded the old GPA. I could have used some padding!

www.newsobserver.com/sports/spt-columns-...article78881417.html

Because the university has assiduously avoided defining what took place in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies and elsewhere as “academic fraud” – preferring to use such saccharine terms as “anomalous classes” and “academic irregularities” – the NCAA cannot and will not prosecute it as such.

As long as North Carolina doesn’t call it academic fraud, the NCAA won’t, either – the precise separation of powers Moeser endorsed and still supports.

In the email, Moeser wrote of what happened at Auburn, “It is not a pretty story, but it describes a dysfunctional university.” One no more dysfunctional, as it turns out, than North Carolina at the time. It would take another five years before the grim truth started coming to light in Chapel Hill, and not because of the university’s inadequate internal vigilance.

It’s hard to look at that and believe universities can be counted upon to oversee their own academic integrity when it comes to athletics. Neither, apparently, can the NCAA.

www.forbes.com/sites/bdavidridpath/2016/...g-turn/#23f7ca00316b

I believe, and think anyone off the street who is not a North Carolina fan or apologist knows, that this was a long standing scheme that would not have occurred as long or to the level it did but for the benefit to certain athletes.

Strangely the NCAA issued an amended notice of allegations (ANOA) in April 2016. Not a complete surprise as the NCAA does often modify issues during an investigation, but strange here because the first NOA seemed so clear cut. Surely any amendment would be to add charges or modify existing ones. Wrong! The ANOA became a milquetoast version of the original notice as football and men’s basketball were essentially removed from any potential penalties and charges from the enforcement staff. To say this shocked some people was an understatement.

However, I would argue and I think successfully, that there is much variability when it comes to the major programs and NCAA sanctions. In other words the NCAA will take a way out if they can get it and attorneys like Evard can gently guide them there, lest they punish programs that are financially and commercially more viable than others. Yes that means North Carolina and its powerhouse basketball program are very important and it behooves the NCAA to minimize any sanctions if they can against major programs.

A piece by Dana O'Neil at ESPN.

I pulled out the last part of the article which really explains why UNC is getting by w/o be punished. It seems like one of those "moving forward, things will be different" kind of deals. Kinda bogus if you ask me.

www.espn.com.au/mens-college-basketball/...n-notice-allegations

The NCAA knows it can't, which is why in April the organization announced new rules regarding academic misconduct. Schools now must adhere to strict academic integrity policies. A violation of those policies now will equate to an NCAA violation. Here's the kicker from the NCAA's own press release:

"Additionally the proposal recognizes schools can't predict every type of academic integrity issue that could occur. Therefore, some misconduct committed by staff members or boosters that doesn't violate a school's academic misconduct policies may still violate NCAA rules."

In other words, we'll know it when we see it.

Surely under those rules, North Carolina wouldn't have passed the smell test.

In adjudicating UNC's case, the rules are too little too late, enacted after the NCAA began its investigation.

Instead the school is allowed to make what, by all accounts, is a nervy, illogical and downright laughable defense.

And it just might work.

A very in depth article (part 1 of 4) reviewing the entire mess.........and still nothing will happen.

www.newsobserver.com/news/special-report...rticle101978907.html

Part 2 of 4.........

www.newsobserver.com/news/special-report...rticle102531722.html

Thorp had other problems. The youthful chancellor, a chemistry whiz who had risen quickly to the university’s top spot at age 43, had entered the office with a genuine belief in “The Carolina Way.”

He was a UNC grad who would later say that he had been too trusting of those around him and too slow to get to the bottom of the problems within the African studies department. One month into Martin’s investigation, in September 2012, Thorp announced his resignation.

A relationship involving UNC’s top fundraiser, Matt Kupec, a former star quarterback for the university, and Tami Hansbrough, the mother of a popular UNC basketball player, Tyler Hansbrough, was the final straw in two years of athletic-related scandals. Kupec and Hansbrough had traveled together on trips at university expense that had little to do with university business, and Thorp had approved Hansbrough’s job and traveled with the couple several times.

Thorp pledged to stay until the end of the academic year. He saw it as an opportunity to right the ship for his successor.

But one of his first moves showed how little some at the university wanted to tackle the pressure that big-money sports places on academics. During a visit in late September to The N&O, Thorp announced that UNC would be coming forward with tougher standards on academics for athletes that he predicted would be “national news.”

“Academics are going to have to come first,” Thorp said in an interview that was taped by The N&O. “And it’s clear that they haven’t to the extent that they should.”

Three weeks after Thorp’s comments, men’s basketball coach Roy Williams brought an end to Thorp’s talk about UNC leading the way with tougher academic standards.

“I’m not so sure that everything that appeared is exactly what Chancellor Thorp meant,” Williams told reporters at the ACC’s annual basketball media day. “I personally don’t think that anybody in the ACC is going to try to do any of those new measures before everybody else does them.”

The university adopted no new standards that measured up to what Thorp had promised.

Part 3 of 4.................

www.newsobserver.com/news/special-report...rticle102613232.html

Mitchell’s push for a full investigation of the bogus classes heightened the tension between the Raleigh lawyer and his colleagues on the board of governors and the university’s trustees. Correspondence from that period, recently released to The N&O, reveals a board eager to move past the long-running scandal – and frustration with those who didn’t agree.

Nyang’oro had set up a “research paper” class at the request of an academic counselor to the football team. A tutor asked Crowder to approve topics for papers for athletes. Two academic advisers for non-athletes discussed how Crowder didn’t want students from “the frat circuit” coming to her to enroll in the paper classes.

The emails contradicted key assertions made by UNC and Martin. Academic counselors to athletes had helped create a class. Crowder, an administrative employee, was performing the work of a faculty member. And Crowder didn’t want to make her classes available to everyone.

Part 4 of 4........

www.newsobserver.com/news/special-report...rticle102701612.html

As Woodall and Hicks scheduled interviews with roughly 10 football players, they were in for a surprise. The athletes showed up on Aug. 2, 2012, with lawyers who advised them not to talk. Their athletic eligibility was at risk if they did, the lawyers said.

It’s unclear who paid for the legal representation. UNC officials have declined to answer the question.

During that time, ESPN and The N&O reported heavy use of the bogus classes by the 2005 men’s basketball team that won the NCAA championship. The editorial page editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, who knew Crowder, wrote that she was such an avid basketball fan that some losses left her so distraught she couldn’t go to work the next day.

At 1 p.m. on Oct. 22, 2014, Wainstein, Folt, Ross and UNC Athletics Director Bubba Cunningham conducted a news conference in an auditorium in UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. National and local media took up many of the seats. It was a much bigger media turnout than for Martin’s report nearly two years earlier.

The findings were staggering. In sheer numbers alone, the scandal had lasted 18 years, involved more than 3,100 students, roughly half of them athletes. The investigation found 189 lecture classes that never met. All but three were created and graded by Crowder. Nyang’oro admitted providing high grades for athletes in the rest without regard for the quality of the work.

Roughly 1,300 courses characterized as independent study also had no instruction, no meetings, no drafts of papers required. Anyone who turned in a paper got a high grade; plagiarism was rampant.

Reaction from members of the board of governors ranged from little surprise to shock. Louis Bissette and Jim Deal, both lawyers on the special review panel, said the findings weren’t much beyond the Martin report. But Brent Barringer, a Cary lawyer and former board of governors member, told Ross he was “shocked and humiliated by the scope and longevity of this conspiracy of academic fraud.”

“UNC-CH should have listened to Erskine, Peter, u & others much sooner & we could already b in the second year of recovery rather than just now hitting bottom & recognizing our instinctual addiction to defensiveness/arrogance,” Barringer wrote. “AA would suggest we have only 9.5 more steps to go.”

Some trustees continued to assert athletics played no role, other than athletes being in the classes. Charles Duckett told one writer: “The student athletes did not create this problem. They not create a single course. They did not grade a single paper. They did not cover up administrative failure to monitor their own work.”

But Gardner, after outlining all UNC had done to try to tackle the problems, abandoned that defense in an email to an alum. He asked that it be kept private.

“Of course, the ultimate root cause is big time college athletics,” he wrote. “It is easy to say we should immediately terminate athletic scholarships and withdraw from intercollegiate sports, but it’s just not that simple.”

It is part of a defense that says little about the nature of the classes and focuses heavily on due process. UNC’s main argument: The NCAA has no jurisdiction, because it has no say over the content and rigor of classes. UNC did not self-impose sanctions, choosing to wait for any NCAA punishment.

Current update:

www.newsobserver.com/sports/college/acc/...rticle110315307.html

For two years, UNC-Chapel Hill and NCAA officials talked about the investigation into nearly two decades of fake classes as a joint probe, with both working together to find out if rules were broken.

That cooperative spirit wasn’t in evidence Tuesday, when newly released correspondence showed the NCAA no longer views the university as a partner in the investigation. It instead cited the university’s “willful violations” and “blatant disregard” for NCAA regulations.

On Friday, both sides are expected to be battling again before the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions in an unusual preliminary hearing. UNC is seeking to have a major infractions case thrown out through due-process issues. One of its arguments: The NCAA knew about the fake classes in mid-2011 while investigating other misconduct involving the football team but did not take action.

The NCAA rejected all of UNC’s arguments – and asserted that the university didn’t tell the NCAA everything it should have about the classes in 2011. The commission that accredits UNC made a similar charge in putting UNC on probation for a year in 2015.

“It is now clear that the institution did not provide the (NCAA) enforcement staff with the entire body of pertinent information at that time, and the NCAA relied to its detriment on the thoroughness of the institution’s production,” the NCAA’s enforcement staff wrote.