North Carolina probe: Advisers steered athletes to bogus classes

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: An early version of this story incorrectly quoted North Carolina chancellor Carol Folt. She characterized the incident as "an inexcusable betrayal of our values and our mission and our students' trust."

An independent investigator found evidence directly tying years of no-show classes at the University of North Carolina to a scheme that helped hundreds of athletes — particularly football and men's basketball players — raise their grades and stay eligible over an 18-year period, according to a report released Wednesday.

Kenneth Wainstein, a former U.S. Attorney and general counsel to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pinned most of the wrongdoing on Deborah Crowder, a longtime secretary who managed the African and Afro-American Studies Department, and Julius Nyang'oro, who became chair of curriculum for the department in 1992.

Wainstein, however, also found that academic advisers who worked closely with the athletic department regularly steered athletes to these classes for the specific purpose of raising their grades, going so far on some occasions as to advise Crowder what grades were needed to maintain eligibility.

The report also blasted North Carolina's administration for its lack of oversight that allowed the fraudulent classes to go unchecked for years. And unlike previous investigations — including one done by the NCAA in 2011 that found "insufficient evidence of athletic purposes behind the classes" — Wainstein's report makes clear that the motivation was largely rooted in a desire to help athletes.

The NCAA announced in June it has reopened its investigation in light of the fact that Wainstein was instructed by the university to share any relevant information with the NCAA.

"I am deeply disappointed in the duration and scope of the wrongdoing, missing vital checks and balances that could have corrected this much sooner and saved so much anguish and embarrassment," said North Carolina chancellor Carol Folt, who noted that nine university employees have been disciplined or terminated in the wake of the report.

Wainstein found that more than 3,100 students received one or more semesters of "deficient instruction ... and were awarded high grades that often had little relationship to the quality of their work." North Carolina football players accounted for 963 enrollments in the so-called "paper classes," and men's basketball players accounted for 226 beginning in 1999, when Crowder began listing these independent study-style courses as lecture classes even though classes never met.

The investigation found that Crowder was primarily responsible for creating the classes, enrolling students in them, assigning the research paper topics and giving out grades — "typically with high As or Bs and largely without regard to the quality of the papers," Wainstein wrote — even though she was not a faculty member but rather a Student Services Manager who ran the department's administrative tasks.

Though Wainstein found several instances in which others within the African and Afro-American Studies Department or in other parts of campus were suspicious of the classes and Crowder's outsized role in academic matters of athletes, the problems weren't discovered until the media began looking into academic fraud related to the football program in 2011.

"We found there is a sense in academia back then that strict oversight and strict management might conflict with academic independence and the prerogative of a professor to provide his or her instruction," Wainstein said. "I think that's a false dichotomy, but that's why people pushed back against the idea of more oversight."

For years, people working closely with athletics took advantage, and academic counselors for the football program even pushed Nyang'oro, the department chair, to get the so-called "paper classes" up and running again after Crowder retired in 2009. The semester following her retirement, the football team's average GPA dipped to 2.121, Wainstein found, the lowest in 10 years.

The investigation concluded there was more steering from advisers to the classes in football than basketball, where players found the classes more indirectly through "locker room advising."

Wainstein said his interviews revealed that basketball coach Roy Williams was "uncomfortable with clustering" in the African-American Studies department because of the optics that players were being steered toward that major. Early in his tenure at North Carolina, he asked his assistant coach in charge of academic matters and the basketball team's primary academic counselor not to steer players toward those classes.

Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano, who was North Carolina's defensive coordinator in 2007, was named in the report as one of the people associated with the program who refused to speak with Wainstein.

Until the release of this report, North Carolina administrators had maintained that this scandal was not athletic-centric but rather academic. Wainstein, however, found that athletes accounted for 47.4% of the enrollment in the fraudulent classes, a disproportionately high percentage given that they made up 4% of the student population. Of those, 50.9% were football players and 12.2% were men's basketball players.

Folt acknowledged Wednesday that this is now an athletic and academic scandal.

"I believe we now know what happened," she said "This investigation shows us that bad actions of a very few failed our students and faculty and staff and undermined our institution. It was an inexcusable betrayal of our values and our mission and our students' trust. The length of time this behavior went on and the number of people involved is really shocking. It was a wrongdoing that could have and should have been stopped much earlier."

Wainstein said his group reviewed more than 1.6 million documents and interviewed 126 people, including Crowder and Nyang'oro, who never spoke with previous university investigations because of a criminal inquiry that ended late last year. ​

The NCAA and the university released a joint statement:

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the NCAA enforcement staff continue to engage in an independent and cooperative effort to review information of possible NCAA rules violations as was announced earlier this year. The university provided the enforcement staff with a copy of the Wainstein Reports for its consideration. The information included in the Wainstein Reports will be reviewed by the university and enforcement staff under the same standards that are applied in all NCAA infractions cases. Due to rules put in place by the NCAA membership, neither the university nor the enforcement staff will comment on the substance of the report as it applies to possible NCAA rules violations.