For years, UNC protected its athletic dominance wth fake classes to keep athletes eligible. In 2011, the secret exploded into public view, threatening to shatter the university’s athletic standing. Read Andy’s book: https://press.umich.edu/Books/D/Discredited2 Read Dan Kane’s reporting: https://www.newsobserver.com/profile/218713930/dan-kane For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What led to the exposure of UNC's academic scandal?
And that is it!
North Carolina takes the title!
And the leaders of the university wanted to do everything they could to sustain and promote future athletic success.
I'm in the academic support program and I'm working with athletes who, they're just so far behind. How on earth are we going to keep these players eligible? You know, I learned about the paper class system pretty quickly.
There was a Potemkin village of a curriculum here. The courses had titles, they had course numbers, it seemed that they had instructors, and none of that was real.
That's the biggest academic scandal in the history of college sports and probably in the history of academia. We were all complicit because we enjoyed game day so much. Shame on us.
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Chapter 2: Who was Debbie Crowder and what role did she play in the scandal?
In 2008, Debbie Crowder announced her retirement from UNC. She'd spent two decades as the office administrator in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, or AFAM. During this time, she'd used her position to offer fake courses that helped student-athletes stay academically eligible. So for the athletic department, her retirement wasn't exactly welcome news.
Almost immediately, academic advisors sounded the alarm in a meeting with football coaches. They presented a PowerPoint that made one thing clear. These fake courses had been a lifeline for many football players' eligibility. One PowerPoint slide bluntly stated, "...we put them in classes that met degree requirements in which they didn't go to class." these no longer exist.
Chapter 3: How did the UNC scandal affect the football team's performance?
And these academic advisors were right to be worried. Because the very semester after Debbie retired, the football team earned its worst grade point average in more than a decade, a GPA of 2.1. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, the decades-long scheme at UNC finally comes to light.
I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and as anybody who's from North Carolina will tell you, I think college basketball in particular is a humongous deal here.
This is Andy. He's an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education and author of Discredited, The UNC Scandal and College Athletics Amateur Ideal. But perhaps most importantly, he went to UNC when the scandal first broke.
Basketball is so central and so sort of attached to the heart of UNC for a couple of very obvious reasons. One of them is that the most famous basketball player who has ever lived went to Carolina. It's Michael Jordan, of course. He's very much attached to the program still. His image is on the Nike logo that adorns UNC apparel. And then the second reason is Dean Smith.
Dean Smith was the legendary head coach of the UNC men's basketball team from 1961 to 1997. Over those 36 years, he transformed the team into a national powerhouse with a record-setting 879 victories. But if you ask anyone at UNC, they'll tell you Smith is remembered for a lot more than just his accomplishments on the court.
This was a coach who talked very loudly and persuasively about the importance of academics and of ethics. This was an intoxicating quality for professors, for students, for administrators, because Dean Smith was coaching in an era where people started to get a little bit antsy in college sports about scandals.
In the 1980s, college sports were rocked by one scandal after another. Everything from academic cheating to pay-for-play schemes. But at UNC, coach Dean Smith was championing a different path. He called it the Carolina way, a commitment to doing things the right way. Andy says it's a philosophy that long outlived Smith's tenure as head coach.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the 'Carolina Way'?
If you were a student at UNC, the Carolina way is not something you could miss. It was everywhere. That phrase alone, you would see everywhere on signs. If you went to any kind of sporting event, you would see it. It was a source of institutional pride, the idea that you can win and you can win the right way. You can win the Carolina way.
UNC actually seemed to practice what it preached. While athletic programs at other universities weathered scandals and sanctions, UNC stood apart, boasting a pristine reputation. From 1961 all the way to 2010, UNC managed to avoid a single NCAA violation.
That changed in July 2010, the summer before Andy's sophomore year, when a UNC football player took to social media bragging about his experience at a Miami nightclub.
This player tweeted basically that like he was in Miami at a club and getting bottles for free, something to that effect. And it was like a lyric from a song, but it caught a bunch of notice, including from NCAA investigators.
Once investigators stepped in, the floodgates opened. They uncovered that several football players had been accepting free plane tickets and hotel stays, a clear violation of NCAA rules prohibiting outside gifts. Then came another revelation. A tutor had written portions of players' papers. UNC administrators responded swiftly, hoping to snuff out the scandal before it grew.
They suspended over a dozen players, some indefinitely. And the head coach memorably said, "'There is no single game more important than the character and integrity of this university.'" The strategy might have worked if the story had ended there. But one of the suspended football players decided to fight back and filed a lawsuit to get back on the team.
He argued that the NCAA and UNC had overreached. He filed a lawsuit and buried inside of this lawsuit were some of the papers that this player had written to prove that he'd done his own academic work.
The paper was for a course in the AFAM department, with department chair Julius Nyong'oro listed at the top.
So some NC State fans go into the lawsuit, they plug it into a plagiarism detection software and find that, lo and behold, this paper was heavily plagiarized.
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Chapter 5: How did social media contribute to uncovering the scandal?
The professor of that 400-level course was none other than Julius Nyong'oro, the same professor who had neglected to report the clearly plagiarized paper.
And we made the decision right there that this is a story. There's something wrong here. Something doesn't make sense. We published another story. And that day, Mary Willingham sent me an email and she was willing to talk off the record.
You'll remember Mary from the previous episode. She worked as a learning specialist in the academic support program for student athletes.
So I asked her what was going on here, you know, with what we were seeing. And she said the African Afro-American Studies Department, you know, had these classes that, you know, looked like they were lecture classes, but they weren't in fact meeting. And this was just absolutely mind-blowing.
Dan filed a records request with UNC, asking for five years' worth of transcripts. It sent administrators into a panic. In order to stay ahead of his reporting, the university quickly announced an internal investigation into what they called academic irregularities. The following spring, they quietly released their findings in the middle of final exams.
They confirmed that the AFAM department had in fact been offering paper classes for the past few years. But they didn't acknowledge the fact that 40% of the students enrolled in those fraudulent courses were from the football and men's basketball teams.
You know, there was this sense of holding back, trying to control the story, trying to say we dealt with it, time to move forward.
As much as UNC wanted to move on, they couldn't. Because in the months that followed, Dan Cain kept breaking one blockbuster story after another, including the explosive revelation that Julius had been paid $12,000 to teach a summer course that never actually met. And then came a discovery that took the scandal to a whole new level.
While browsing UNC's website, Dan stumbled upon a page where students could upload their transcripts to check outstanding grade requirements. On that page was a sample transcript.
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Chapter 6: Who is Dan Kane and what role did he play in exposing the scandal?
One in a billion shot that this would ever happen. I mean, it was just kind of an explosion, you know, a big explosion because it really put into focus the seriousness of the situation.
UNC had no choice but to launch a second investigation, this time led by someone outside the UNC bubble, former North Carolina governor, Jim Martin.
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By fall 2012, Dan Cain's reporting was causing massive waves. His story had already triggered one internal investigation with another now underway, led by Jim Martin. But despite the shock of his findings, Dan still had no one on the record to back up his allegations. That changed in October 2012, when Mary Willingham attended the memorial service for UNC's former president.
He'd been a staunch advocate for integrity in college athletics.
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Chapter 7: How did the discovery of Julius Peppers' transcript change the investigation?
They could avoid a criminal prosecution if Debbie and Julius agreed to cooperate with a thorough investigation. This time, the investigation would be led by a no-nonsense former general counsel at the FBI, Kenneth Weinstein.
Over the next eight months, Weinstein and his team sifted through millions of emails, analyzed thousands of student transcripts, interviewed more than 100 people, and took the testimonies of both Julius and Debbie. On October 22, 2014, Weinstein announced his findings. And they were nothing short of explosive.
The University of North Carolina today reeling from a blow, a really big blow to its reputation.
The report found that over the 18 years between 1993 and 2011, Debbie and Julius had offered 188 fake lecture courses, along with hundreds of bogus independent studies. More than 3,100 students, nearly half of them athletes, took at least one semester of deficient instruction. Here's Jay Smith again.
Having Weinstein lay out the case for decades of fraud in the way he did was very gratifying to me personally. I'm a longtime employee at UNC. I shouldn't have taken such joy at UNC's humiliation, but I did.
Unlike all previous investigations, this one made it clear that these courses were designed above all to keep student athletes eligible. It also made clear the sheer number of people who were complicit, academic counselors, coaches, and even academic deans.
What happened at UNC now appears to be the biggest academic fraud scandal in all of college sports history. And I have to tell you that this is validation for Mary Willingham,
For years, the NCAA had stayed on the sidelines. But now, sitting out was no longer an option. From the very beginning of the UNC scandal, fans feared one thing above all, NCAA involvement. The NCAA governs college sports and has the power to punish schools that break the rules. Punishments that range from player suspensions to the removal of championship banners.
By the summer of 2015, those punishments were becoming a very real possibility. The NCAA formally accused UNC of violating its rules. It argued that UNC had provided impermissible benefits to student athletes in the form of paper classes. For two decades, these classes had awarded athletes high grades, with little to no work required. The facts certainly didn't look good for UNC.
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Chapter 8: What steps did UNC take in response to the scandal?
The NCAA said it didn't have the authority to punish UNC under its rules. So in the end, Jay says, the only real consequence UNC faced was the negative media coverage.
That was the worst punishment it suffered. And it deserved much worse. It deserved to pay a serious, meaningful institutional price for decades of cheating. And it didn't have to.
In the wake of the NCAA decision, the UNC chancellor stated, We believe this is the correct and fair outcome. I am grateful that this case has been decided and that the university can continue to focus on delivering the best possible education to our students.
To make a long story short, accountability didn't mean anything to them. They were not interested in dealing truthfully with what had happened.
If the university wouldn't confront the scandal, then Smith would do it himself. Normally an expert in early modern France, he created a new course titled Big Time College Sports and the Rights of Athletes, 1956 to the Present.
So I designed this class that was focused on the rights of athletes and the various ways in which they are suppressed, mitigated, violated all the time.
Smith isn't alone in arguing that college athletes are often deprived of their rights, especially their right to an education. These student athletes commit themselves to their sport, often bringing in significant revenue for their schools, with the understanding that they'll receive a free education in return. But all too often, Smith says, the educational side of that bargain falls short.
In the most extreme cases, players are enrolled in courses that don't even exist. When it comes to UNC, I asked Smith what measures have been put in place to prevent this kind of educational fraud from happening again.
I want to be as fair and generous as I can to my colleagues here at UNC. I do want to acknowledge that steps have been taken to ensure that certain kinds of abuses can't occur again. So the independent studies system has been completely revamped.
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