On an August evening more than four years ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill called a hurried news conference.
H. Holden Thorp, who was then chancellor, opened with a somber message. “To everyone who loves this university,” he said, “I’m sorry for what I have to tell you.”
He told reporters that an NCAA investigation of the university’s football program had taken a turn that few people at Chapel Hill expected. It was no longer just about a few football players’ getting some extra cash from sports agents.
If only.
Rather, the evidence suggested that a tutor had helped Tar Heel players to cheat. The heretofore unblemished academic side of the house had been sullied.
“We will find out what happened,” Mr. Thorp pledged.
All this time later, they have not.
“We will not let these mistakes define us,” he said.
But they are beginning to.
Since that August night, a harsh spotlight has shone on years of academic fraud at one of the nation’s most respected public universities. Chapel Hill officials now concede that athletes frequently enrolled in no-show classes, where they were given course credit for writing a single paper. Charges of plagiarism have been leveled, and a whistle-blower has publicly alleged that functionally illiterate athletes were kept eligible to play through a shadow system of widespread cheating.
What is most surprising about Chapel Hill’s plight is not just the mere fact that it happened. It is the reality that the scandal simply refuses to die.
The university has tried everything in the crisis-management playbook, and nothing seems to have worked. More than a half-dozen reports by internal committees and independent investigators have been issued on what went wrong, a handful of administrators have resigned or been forced out, and new policies have been put into place that promise to prevent future academic improprieties.
But Chapel Hill finds itself fending off new charges of malfeasance. Allegations of academic fraud have grown so common at the university that Carol L. Folt, who was appointed chancellor after Mr. Thorp stepped down last year, felt compelled to issue a public statement that said, “We may not be able to respond to each new report or allegation.”
In the fall, a former U.S. Justice Department official is expected to complete yet another investigation into academic anomalies at Chapel Hill. Until then, Ms. Folt has said she will stay mostly silent on the subject. She declined to speak with The Chronicle for this article.
Some of the scandal’s staying power is surely beyond the university’s control. Chapel Hill‘s problems came to light at a time when skepticism about big-time college athletics is sharper than ever. Lawsuits and NCAA investigations have stoked concerns about whether athletes are being exploited by universities, many of which have come to seem like places where winning trumps learning.
But some wounds in this case are self-inflicted. University-sponsored investigations have seemed at pains to play down any connection between Chapel Hill’s athletics program and the crisis. The matter has been cast as an academic issue, involving nonathletes and athletes alike, rather than as a troubling illustration of what can happen when academically underprepared ballplayers are admitted to a highly selective institution.
“They didn’t want to dig deeper to find the motor of the academic scandal, and it’s for that reason that here we are, four years later and still asking questions,” says Jay M. Smith, a history professor who is an outspoken critic of the administration’s handling of the situation.
Specifically, Mr. Smith and other faculty members question the conclusions of a high-profile report that was meant to bring closure to the case.
In late 2012, James G. Martin, a former governor of North Carolina, wrote the university’s most definitive account to date on the academic fraud. After a four-month investigation, he identified 216 suspect courses and 454 potentially unauthorized grade changes made over a period of years, sometimes with forged faculty signatures. The problems, he said, appeared to involve just two rogue administrators—not coaches or athletics counselors—and were isolated to the department of African and Afro-American studies, which is often called AFAM.
“This was not an athletics scandal,” said Governor Martin, who was a chemistry professor at Davidson College before he entered politics. “This was an academic scandal, which is worse.”
Those who agree with that assessment point out that, from 2001 to 2012, a majority of students who enrolled in suspect courses were not athletes. But critics say that statistic lacks context. Athletes accounted for 45 percent of the enrollment in those classes but less than 5 percent of the undergraduate body.
To Frank R. Baumgartner, a distinguished professor of political science at Chapel Hill, those numbers suggest that—at a minimum—the fraud was disproportionately associated with athletics.
“I’ve been astounded at the tin ear the administration has shown, continuing to say that it’s an academic scandal rather than an athletic scandal,” he says. “The statistics just make it clear. You see a pattern like that, an overrepresentation that is so statistically obvious, and you reach a conclusion.”
In the past four years, a rather nasty rift has developed between Chapel Hill’s professoriate and the counselors who advise athletes. The infighting has doubtless contributed to the prolonged nature of the crisis, as both sides ascribe culpability to each other.
John G. Blanchard, a former senior associate athletic director, says rumor and innuendo have unfairly tarnished the reputation of the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes, whose counselors advise players on course selection, among other things. The counselors are paid by the athletics department but report to an associate dean.
“If a course is offered at the university and faculty are teaching it, it is not up to the person who works with student-athletes to see that the course is not fraudulent,” Mr. Blanchard says. “That’s not their job. The academic counselors have gotten a really bad rap, and it’s been totally unfair.”
Mr. Blanchard, who retired in 2013, figures prominently in a story that has pitted faculty members against athletics personnel. It is his contention that, on two occasions, he raised concerns about AFAM courses to the Faculty Athletics Committee, a panel of professors that advises the chancellor on the conduct of athletics. Mr. Blanchard says he tried to point out that some courses in the department were advertised as lecture classes but operated like independent studies, which meant they did not actually meet in class sessions.
Committee members told him that professors have wide latitude in how they teach, he says. That is academic-speak for “back off.”
His account challenges the conventional narrative that the athletics department must have conspired to keep athletes eligible in no-show classes and, if accurate, would shift blame to a widening group of professors. Members of the committee, however, have disputed that Mr. Blanchard ever raised any concerns.
Throughout the scandal, the university has sought to contain such conflicts and control the flow of information, a standard part of the playbook for any institution under scrutiny. But its attempts to control the story have largely failed. At several turns, Internet message boards and data breaches have breathed new life into the controversy. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of this scandal playing out at such length before the age of crowdsourcing.
In 2011, for instance, readers of a message board popular with North Carolina State University fans dissected a paper written by Michael McAdoo, a former Tar Heel football player. They discovered multiple instances of apparent plagiarism in the paper, which Mr. McAdoo had submitted for a Swahili class in the AFAM department.
Users of the message board, Pack Pride, approached their investigation with glee. “LOLOLOL,” wrote one. “I can’t wait till the media gets this and breaks this down. Let’s help.”
More recently, in August, Tar Heel fans used a message board to root out more plagiarism. But this time the ad hoc investigation focused on Mary C. Willingham, a former learning specialist at Chapel Hill, who has alleged that barely literate athletes were kept eligible through sham classes. Her critics discovered that her master’s thesis contained numerous unattributed passages.
Campus officials, too, have tried to discredit her. James W. Dean Jr., the provost, has said that Ms. Willingham’s research into athletes’ reading abilities is faulty and “unworthy of this university.”
She responds that, by criticizing her, university leaders are trying to distract the public. “Rather than focusing on me and my own faults, we should focus on the system,” says Ms. Willingham, who is suing the university for what she describes as a hostile work environment. She has resigned from her job there.
To some faculty observers, the university’s efforts to undermine Ms. Willingham have served mainly to prolong the crisis. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, who helped write a faculty report on the academic fraud at Chapel Hill, says the university has missed an opportunity to work with the whistle-blower on improving education for its athletes.
“That part seems really unfortunate,” says Ms. Maffly-Kipp, who has become a distinguished professor in the humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. “I don’t see the value for UNC in disparaging Mary Willingham or criticizing her.”
Eager to bring a close to the crisis and begin mending the rifts on the campus, the university has pinned its hopes on Kenneth L. Wainstein, a longtime official of the U.S. Justice Department, who has been hired to conduct a full and independent investigation of the academic irregularities at Chapel Hill.
Karen Kasmauski
Kenneth Wainstein, a lawyer in Washington, says his investigation of academic fraud at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will be “more meat and potatoes” than previous reports, getting into “who did what when.”
If that sounds familiar, it should. He is expected to deliver essentially what the university said Governor Martin would provide in 2012. But the landscape has changed since then. New allegations have been made by former athletes. Key figures who had previously not cooperated with investigators have agreed to do so. Included in that list is Julius E. Nyang’oro, a former chairman of the AFAM department, who has taken most of the blame in the scandal.
On a recent morning at his Washington office, Mr. Wainstein recalled the beginnings of his investigation, which has already spanned five months and is expected to conclude in the fall. It started with a call from Chapel Hill’s general counsel, who said the administration had concluded that the crisis was not going to end on its own. Someone needed to dig deeper. They turned to Mr. Wainstein because he had a record of doing just that. In 2013 he issued a critical report on the NCAA’s botched investigation of the University of Miami.
“The worst thing about this was the steady drip, drip, drip,” Mr. Wainstein says of Chapel Hill’s controversy. “The damage wasn’t going to subside until the whole story was out—good, bad, or indifferent.”
Mr. Wainstein, 52, has built a reputation on chasing bad guys. He has prosecuted white-collar criminals as a U.S. attorney and has worked on counterterrorism in the Homeland Security Department under President George W. Bush. His hair, graying a bit at the sides, is tightly cropped. His iPhone case, clipped to his belt, is the modern equivalent of a pocket protector. It is “dweeby,” he admits.
But when he shifts into prosecutorial mode, the nerdy pretense evaporates. Discussing the 1.5 million emails he has collected in his investigation, he leans across a granite conference table and turns a bit intense. At its heart, he says, this case is about squaring what people are saying now with what they said privately years ago.
“Here’s an email,” he says, sliding a white cocktail napkin across the table in a mock demonstration of an interrogation. “Now you’re saying X, Y, Z. Look at this email.”
“We make it very clear that the worst thing you can do is lie,” Mr. Wainstein says, “because we’re going to lay that out in the report.”
The previous reports have had plenty of data but have said little about the motives behind years of academic fraud. Why would Mr. Nyang’oro and Deborah Crowder, a former manager in the AFAM department, have chosen to preside over a system of bogus lecture courses, as investigations suggest? To raise enrollment in hopes of adding a few new faculty positions? To score a few football tickets?
How could so many of their close colleagues and supervisors have been so oblivious to the fraud, as they say they were for nearly 15 years? Because they were too polite to ask?
Mr. Wainstein isn’t discussing the specifics of what he has uncovered but does say that this report “is more meat and potatoes” than its predecessors. “Who did what when?”
Meanwhile, as the fall term gets under way, Chapel Hill finds itself in a state of suspended animation. Everyone, it seems, is waiting for Mr. Wainstein to close the book on the scandal once and for all.
In some corners, there exists the hope that the university will finally get a public flogging. Past reports have been criticized as overly sanitized. The measure of the imminent report’s authenticity may be the extent to which it inflicts pain on parties it deems responsible.
“If it is less than devastating, people will say it’s a whitewash by the university,” says Mr. Baumgartner, the political-science professor.
Recent history may have contributed to such expectations. In 2012, Louis J. Freeh, a former director of the FBI, issued a damning report on Pennsylvania State University’s handling of child-sex-abuse allegations against a former assistant football coach. The report had its critics, but it satisfied some skeptics by clearly ascribing blame to top administrators.
Mr. Wainstein says he is aware that some people want him to be tough, perhaps even tougher than he should be. “Your job is not to pull punches,” he says. “But your job is not to land punches that aren’t justified.”
“At the end of this,” he continues, “I’m going to lay it out. I want people to say he looked everywhere he should have looked. He pushed as hard as one should.”
That’s what the last guy said, too.
Timeline: Contending With a Crisis
When a college is embroiled in scandal, the standard response is to conduct investigations, to fire people and to produce reports on what went wrong. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has done all of these things, but its academic fraud crisis lives on.
