In UNC Case, No Watchdog for Major Academic Fraud

Updated (10/13/2017, 4:50 p.m.) with more details.

In 2012, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill acknowledged that a widespread scheme of academic fraud had been taking place on its campus. Eventually a report revealed that more than 3,000 students had taken sham courses, over two decades, that gave generous grades for little or no coursework. Nearly half of those students were athletes at the university.

Now, some five years after that revelation, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has spared Chapel Hill from penalties in the case, saying it could not conclude that the university had actually violated the association’s rules.

The announcement that UNC had essentially avoided punishment served as a reminder that neither the NCAA nor the university’s accreditor has been willing or able to level an effective punishment, even for the kind of extraordinary shortfall that this scandal represents.

And that has left many observers in higher education frustrated over the reality that there is no adequate watchdog in such cases, and no penalties available beyond the shadow of public shame.

A report by the NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions pointed to a “singular principle” that it said had guided its decision not to hand down penalties against the university. The question of whether fraud occurs, the panel said, is a question to be answered by the association’s member institutions, and not by the NCAA itself.

“The membership trusts academic entities to hold themselves accountable and report academic fraud to the NCAA and has chosen to constrain who decides what constitutes academic fraud,” the report stated.

The committee also blamed what it called a “stale and incomplete record” of the case, which prevented it from concluding that fraud had taken place.

In a written statement, Chapel Hill’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, said the university believed that the findings represented “the correct — and fair — outcome.”

In a conference call with reporters, Ms. Folt said that despite the lack of penalties from the NCAA, other colleges would be deterred from engaging in such activity, and that her institution had learned its lesson.

“I don’t believe there’s a president or a chancellor in the country that would like to go through this,” Ms. Folt said.

During the same conference call, the university’s athletic director, Bubba Cunningham, challenged the notion that UNC had gotten away with something.

“We’ve been wrestling with that as a university for six years. We had some things occur that we haven’t been proud of,” he said.

“Unfortunately, sometimes the behavior you’re not proud of just doesn’t quite fit into a bylaw or a rule or something.”

“We’re not proud of the behavior,” he said, “but we didn’t think it violated the bylaw.”

‘We All Feel a Little Dirtier Today’

But some experts on college athletics said the NCAA’s decision represented a failure of its members to hold themselves accountable.

Donna Lopiano, a former chief executive officer of the Women’s Sports Foundation and longtime director of women’s athletics at the University of Texas at Austin, said the association did not have “the will, history, or capacity” to take serious and meaningful actions against its members.

“Right now the members are policing themselves but also acting in their own self-interest,” she said. “You can’t have a governance organization that consists of its own members. You have to have some independence.”

“No one is going to be happy” with the NCAA’s decision, said B. David Ridpath, an associate professor of sports administration at Ohio University. The NCAA is good at producing sports events, like championship competitions, he said, but “is not willing to make sanctions serious.”

“UNC won, and the beat goes on with regards to the NCAA façade on education and the supposed “student” before “athlete,” he said. “I think even the most passionate UNC fan has to feel the need to take a shower. We all feel a little dirtier today, but the NCAA cannot bite the hand that feeds them.”

While the NCAA has recently overhauled its process for handling violations of academic integrity, Mr. Ridpath says a set of proposals from the Drake Group, a faculty group that promotes academic integrity in college sports, would go further in preventing future abuses. In particular, he said, colleges should “redshirt” freshmen who are not academically prepared for college — delay their entry into competition — in the same way that athletics programs delay participation to those who are not ready to compete physically.

In addition, colleges should be required to disclose much more information about the academic performance of their student-athletes. The Drake Group has called for colleges to report seven categories of information, including graduation rates by sport, and the number and success rate of student-athletes admitted with waivers from the college’s enrollment standards.

No ‘Front-Line Protection’

For their part, UNC officials said that it’s the university’s accreditor — the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges — and not the NCAA that should be responding to the sham courses.

“We’ve argued all along that the appropriate body to deal with an academic issue is our accreditor,” said Mark W. Merritt, vice chancellor and general counsel, during the call with reporters.

“The notion that this kind of academic irregularity isn’t somehow addressed or taken care of just ignores the appropriate boundaries between an accreditor and the NCAA,” he said.

The commission had taken some action against UNC, placing it on probation for one year — June 2015 to June 2016 — and requiring several policy changes for it to come into compliance with the commission’s standards.

The only stronger penalty available to the accreditor was to revoke the university’s accreditation, making it ineligible to receive federal financial aid. Such an unusual step would have threatened its existence.

Accreditors do not always require the kind of rigorous internal monitoring that might help uncover misconduct before it is widespread, said Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of education.

“There are examples of accreditors encouraging the types of practices that could prevent a UNC-type situation, but I have not found any accreditor that does it in a consistently rigorous way,” he said in an email. “The front-line protection against this type of fraud should be the campus leadership and the quality-control processes that they establish.”

David A. Bergeron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said the accreditation process is not really meant to look at individual programs or courses. And accreditors are not investigative agencies designed to root out fraud and corruption, he said.

Accreditors can examine whether a college has policies and procedures in place, and has enforced them, to prevent fraud, said Mr. Bergeron, an acting assistant secretary for education under President Obama.

One agency could take significant corrective action against the University of North Carolina, Mr. Bergeron said: the Department of Education.

The department could decide that the university had to repay all the federal financial aid spent on students who took those courses, he said.

Such a measure would be similar, he said, to the finding by the department’s inspector general in 2009 that American Intercontinental University had improperly awarded college credit for courses that were too brief.

“It’s a clear case of receiving aid for which they were not eligible,” he said.

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.