The Confounding Case of Jan Boxill

One day in late October 2014, Jan Boxill walked into a meeting with her provost. She carried a letter that she hoped would clear things up.

Boxill was among the most recognizable of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s faculty members. The philosophy instructor had her hands in nearly every aspect of campus life. She directed a center for ethics. She had for years been the academic adviser to the women’s basketball team, and done public-address announcing for more than one sport. Most notably, she had just finished her tenure as faculty chair, the first untenured professor to ever serve in that position.

The three years Boxill served in the top faculty post had been tumultuous. The campus was in the grip of a damaging scandal that challenged UNC’s core identity as a university that excelled in both athletics and academics. A series of phantom courses had sprung up in the university’s department of African and Afro-American studies, and been used by athletes to keep their grades up. The ensuing uproar had forced a chancellor out, and prompted investigation after investigation.

Questions swirled. Boxill, armed with her experience in both athletics and academics, was on hand to deal with them. She gave interviews, appeared on panels, and spoke publicly about the progress the university was making to deal with the controversy. She’d even led the drafting of a faculty report on the scandal.

Wherever Boxill walked, her reputation preceded her. This was usually a good thing. But that day in October 2014, it was not. She handed over her letter, in which she offered an explanation, only to be handed a letter back. She started reading it, but when she saw what it said, she couldn’t bear to finish it.

It laid out a series of shocking charges: She, the sports ethicist, had acted unethically. She had requested specific grades for her players. She had written parts of their papers for them. And she had been an active participant in the wrongdoing that she had publicly pledged to help the university overcome.

And she was being fired.

Boxill was born on a farm in upstate New York. Her childhood was hard. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was crushed by a tractor in front of her, leaving her and her siblings to fend for themselves. They had no indoor plumbing, refrigeration, or everyday shoes to wear at home. School was Boxill’s only escape, and sports one of her only sources of entertainment: hockey on a frozen pond, or basketball using a bushel basket mounted to a rafter in the barn. Those moments of fun didn’t relieve her of her strongest wish: Get far away from the farm.

Her love of sports helped determine her life’s course. After a stint in the women’s Air Force concert and marching band, she enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles to pursue her undergraduate degree. There she helped start the university’s women’s basketball team, and went on to earn her master’s and doctorate degrees in philosophy.

In the 1980s, she and her husband, Bernard, a political philosopher, hit the academic job market — first to the University of Kentucky, then to Florida, where Boxill was both an instructor and the women’s basketball coach at the University of Tampa (she was named the conference’s coach of the year in 1984). When Bernard got a job offer in North Carolina, the couple moved north and eventually landed in Chapel Hill.

As she had done at each stop before, Boxill sought opportunities in sports. In Chapel Hill, that meant public-address announcing for the women’s basketball team and then a job in the university’s new Student Athlete Development Center, a counseling office devoted solely to athletes.

She became the adviser for women’s basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, and swimming. She also took charge of a program specifically for freshmen, to teach them how to get accustomed to college life. The normal duties of the role were legion: sending out academic-progress reports to her players’ professors, attending study hall every night from 7 to 9, and traveling with the team for their away games.

Over time, Boxill’s experiences with her players instilled in her a deep belief in the power of sports and education: the two forces that had shaped her life. Many of the mostly African American athletes who came into her office faced even greater disadvantages than the orphaned Boxill had. But for both her and her players, sports and education were the ways to overcome them.

When Boxill sat down with her players to ask about their academic interests, she heard over and over again that they were interested in African American studies. Over the years she had attended some of the department’s classes, and was impressed by the teaching styles of the professors. Many of the classes they taught satisfied the students’ curricular requirements, so Boxill would send them over. She learned that Deborah Crowder, the department’s secretary, was the point person with access to course enrollment, and a kindred spirit in that she, too, was the sort of person who could get things done.

In those years of teaching, announcing, and advising, Boxill became a prime exemplar of the Carolina Way, the campus mythology that asserted that Chapel Hill’s academic and athletic excellence were mutually reinforcing. Boxill even got to know the author of the Carolina Way himself, the legendary basketball coach Dean Smith. He occasionally spoke as a guest in her class on sports ethics. Ever the theoretician, the coach had a keen interest in the subject matter. In 2003, Boxill released an anthology on sports ethics. Smith wrote the foreword. “Jan maintains that sports are the single most available means for self-development, self-respect, and self-esteem, when properly played, as cooperative activities,” Smith wrote. “I think she is correct in this.”

Boxill did far more than reap the rewards of a career that embraced the Carolina Way. She sat on committee after committee, board after board, continuing to throw herself into the life of the university. She helped agitate for the rights of adjunct faculty. She started an Ethics Bowl team in the philosophy department. It was this nonstop service that endeared Boxill to her colleagues, eventually resulting in her election as faculty chair. Boxill had come a long way from the farm.

Hours after Boxill had received her notice of termination, a former federal prosecutor named Kenneth Wainstein stood at a podium and revealed the results of his university-commissioned investigation: Over 3,000 students, a disproportionate share of them athletes, had taken classes that had never met and that required only the completion of a paper, graded by Crowder. Academic advisers had pushed athletes to the classes, knowing full well they weren’t legitimate.

Wainstein’s report was big news, and the most damning excerpts ricocheted across the internet. Among the most gobsmacking details were the emails investigators had found belonging to Boxill.

In 2008, she had sent a player’s paper to Crowder, who replied, “Did you say a D will do” for the player? “I’m only asking because 1. no sources, 2, it has absolutely nothing to do with the assignments for that class and 3. it seems to me to be a recycled paper. She took [another class] in spring of 2007 and that was likely for that class.” In a now-infamous reply, Boxill wrote, “Yes, a D will be fine; that’s all she needs. I didn’t look at the paper but figured it was a recycled one as well, but I couldn’t figure out from where!”

In just one exchange, Boxill had seemed to prove that she knew Crowder was awarding grades, that she was directing her which grades to award, and that she was willing to tolerate “recycled” papers. In one email, she was implicated fully in the paper class scheme. That email was cited in articles in The New York Times, New York Daily News, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, which called Boxill “The Ethicist Who Crossed the Line.”

That wasn’t the only instance cited in the report. In 2010, Boxill emailed Crowder’s successor, Travis Gore, with a player’s paper and the comment, “I would give it an A- or at least a B+.” The player was given an A- in the course, which was led by Julius Nyang’oro, the African-studies department chair whom Wainstein found to have played a major role in the fake classes.

Nyang’oro, who resigned in 2011, told Wainstein that he didn’t remember that course, but that he did recall giving women’s basketball players specific grades if Boxill asked him to. “He recalled one particular situation,” the report stated, “when he gave a women’s basketball player a B+ even though he felt her paper was ‘terrible’ and was a ‘clear F.’ He assigned that grade because Boxill had suggested that he do so.”

It didn’t stop there. The report also found that there were instances of Boxill adding snippets to her players’ papers, possibly crossing the line into writing portions of their papers for them.

The new revelations threw new light onto a prior incident. Two years earlier, Boxill had supervised a faculty report on the scandal. A year after its release, The News & Observer published email records that appeared to show that Boxill had kept out of the report a reference to Crowder as “an athletics supporter who was extremely close to personnel in Athletics.” Crowder’s name was also cut out of that section of the report. “The worry is that this could further raise NCAA issues and that is not the intention,” Boxill wrote in an email quoted by the newspaper. The article concluded that Boxill wanted to “lessen the chances the NCAA would come back to campus.”

After the story ran, professors largely spoke out in support of Boxill, who said the emails were taken out of context. But now the News & Observer article looked prescient.

The hits came quickly. She lost her position as director of the Parr Center for Ethics. Her ties with the athletics department were severed. She’d been voted the next distinguished scholar of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, but was asked to withdraw her name. She had been under contract to edit an anthology about ethics in sports, but that was canceled too. She was now a laughingstock nationwide, and a pariah at the university she’d served for decades.

Her dismissal letter presented her with a single option to clear her name. She could request a hearing before a faculty committee, which would consider her case. But it proved to be rough going. She wasn’t allowed to submit others’ written statements of support, and she was finding friendly colleagues hesitant to get on the phone, or to be seen with her in public. She definitely couldn’t get them before a committee. She didn’t have the energy to review the thousands of emails it would take to mount a detailed defense.

Discouraged, Boxill faced the likelihood of going before the committee and being dismissed: the ethics professor who got fired for ethical misconduct. She decided to retire.

Boxill’s daughters urged her to make a public statement of explanation. But after everything that she’d seen written about herself, she couldn’t bear to see her words twisted again. “No matter what I said, it wouldn’t be what I said,” she recalled thinking. Not to mention the fact that she could barely talk about what happened without breaking down. So she stayed silent.

Boxill didn’t air her defense then, but she has one. She sent students to the fake classes, but she thought they were above board; they were in the course catalog, after all. She didn’t know that Crowder, the secretary, was actually grading papers, a clear abuse. She never suspected anything was wrong; why would she? She had no idea what happened in the African and Afro-American-studies department. If the vast majority of the professors in the department were blind to more than a decade of abuses, how could she be expected to have known about them?

What about the infamous “a D will be fine” email? This wasn’t even a paper class; it was an online course, Boxill says, where the professor was out of the country and only reachable by Crowder. The student, a women’s basketball player, sent the paper to Boxill, her adviser, who then sent it to Crowder, the conduit to the professor.

It was the player’s final semester, and she didn’t need a certain grade to graduate, she just needed to turn something in. So when Crowder asked Boxill, “Did you say a D will do?” Boxill knew the grade didn’t matter. The player was in good standing and just needed to complete the class. So she responded that a D would be fine. Crowder had called the player’s paper “recycled,” but Boxill says that didn’t mean it was plagiarized or fake. The student had submitted it in another of the department’s classes, a practice that was not ideal but not akin to plagiarizing someone else.

In other words, the email seemed to show one thing — Boxill’s complicity in the paper-class scheme — but showed something quite different when the full context was considered, she says. In the case where she suggested a grade to Gore, Crowder’s successor, Boxill said Nyang’oro had asked her to work with the student. In her view, then, she was one instructor giving input to another through Gore, the de facto department manager. She wasn’t trying to force a grade on an underling. To Nyang’oro’s apparent claim, mentioned by Wainstein, that Boxill asked the department chair to award a higher grade to a women’s basketball player, Boxill said it’s false. “Never in my life would I have asked him to do that,” she said.

For every supposedly damning piece of evidence laid out in the Wainstein report, Boxill has an explanation. But it is impossible to fully vet each one, as Boxill declined to reveal the names of the students involved, out of what she said was a desire to protect their privacy.

Weighing the evidence, we confront two possibilities: First, that entertaining Boxill’s defense is overly credulous. Indeed, the evidence against her doesn’t just take the form of emails — and there are far more than the two mentioned above. Mary Willingham, Boxill’s former colleague, turned whistleblower, in the academic-support office says Boxill knew everything about the paper classes, including that Crowder graded papers. She knew because they all knew, Willingham says.

And Boxill didn’t publicly reveal her past communications with Crowder when managing the scandal as a faculty leader. She didn’t bring it up, she says, because Crowder was just another student-services manager located buildings away. She didn’t think to bring it up, she says, because she knew nothing about the paper classes.

The second possibility: Emails allowed people to jump to conclusions that didn’t capture the full truth, which is that being an athletic adviser and a professor inevitably involves blurring lines. And it’s misleading and unfair, Boxill says, to pluck attachments to years-old emails to determine her fate.

But there is also a third possibility: To litigate Boxill’s guilt or innocence is to miss the point entirely.

In the middle of the 20th century, the NCAA found itself overseeing the college sports world. A mostly passive lobbying organization until that point, the association was now setting the rulebook. Among those rules: Colleges could pay their athletes in the form of an athletic scholarship but no more. The NCAA has so thoroughly dominated the messaging around college sports that the significance of the athletic scholarship can be easily obscured. No matter how you look at it, it is pay for play — a contract that hinges on a player’s athletic ability.

This simple fact posed a threat to the status quo — “the dreaded notion,” wrote the association’s first executive director, “that NCAA athletes could be identified as employees by state industrial commissions and the courts.” So the association came up with a keen public-relations strategy to hide the truth, he wrote. “We crafted the term student-athlete, and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations as a mandated substitute for such words as players and athletes.” The stakes were clear. If athletes were identified as employees, their wages could no longer be fixed at the value of a scholarship.

Using one word, “student,” the association sought to imprint amateur status on a class of athletes who were quickly being professionalized. And it worked. Petitions seeking workers’ compensation failed, and society came to ratify the notion of the student-athlete. “There can be no question,” wrote Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984, “ … that the preservation of the student-athlete in higher education adds richness and diversity to intercollegiate athletics.”

But there was a problem. For the “student-athlete” label to stick, the athletes had to at least appear to be students. This notion was challenged in the 1970s and ‘80s, when sordid tales of illiteracy and dismal graduation rates prompted public outcry. Colleges responded, mandating new academic rules and requirements for athletes.

Academic-support offices, like the one Boxill joined, sprang up to make sure the requirements were being met. Advisers were the frontline soldiers in the battle to make the myth of the student-athlete seem true. As the myth became more lucrative — wage fixing will do that — it became more important. Other avenues opened up, including the phantom courses. What’s the most valuable commodity to an athlete who enters the university at an academic disadvantage and spends hours upon hours on their sport? An easy class that never meets.

This was the release valve that UNC needed. But when it was discovered, it revealed a wide chasm between Chapel Hill’s squeaky-clean reputation and the contortions that so-called amateurism demanded. Who would pay the price, aside from the athletes deprived of the education they were promised? Not the institution’s leaders, who signed onto the “amateur” myth, but those whose job it was to make the myth seem true.

This included Boxill, but it was not limited to her. Three other counselors were fired, including one who worked at another UNC campus. A popular lecturer in African and Afro-American studies resigned. A longtime administrator whom Wainstein found had missed signals of impropriety and declined to investigate was barred from holding further administrative titles, but retained her tenured professorship.

And then there was Travis Gore. The report had painted Gore largely as an underling of Crowder and Nyang’oro, who had taken orders from each. A year after the report’s release, the university fired Gore. His firing seemed ridiculous to some of his former colleagues. Gore was a happy-go-lucky guy who was on the absolute lowest rung in the department, remembered Michael Lambert, a professor of African studies. “I was embarrassed to be a part of the university when they let him go,” he said.

So was Reginald Hildebrand, a former professor in the department. Gore, he recalled, was nowhere near culpable for any part of the scandal. He couldn’t be; he didn’t have enough power. When Gore was put under disciplinary review, the professor wrote to the provost on his behalf. “If you try to solve this problem by firing our receptionist, the gofer, you’re going to make yourselves look ridiculous,” he recalled writing.

But that’s not what happened. “I was wrong,” Hildebrand said. “They fired him, and they make themselves look like heroes.”

Boxill had more power than Gore, but she was found to have committed the same sin: doing her job. She was called on to keep athletes eligible under a system whose very nature undermined academic standards — standards that, as a faculty member, she was charged with upholding. Pulled in two different directions, she got burned by a voluminous paper trail. The university moved on, casting her aside after nearly 30 years of service, and left its adherence to the “amateur” myth in place.

After she resigned, Boxill confronted the void where her life on campus used to be. No more classes, games, or talks. Her fate, it seemed, was fixed.

But institutional priorities have a way of changing. When it moved to fire Boxill, the university was trying to get to the bottom of the scandal. Three years later, it was trying to persuade the NCAA — which launched a new investigation in response to the Wainstein report — not to penalize its athletics enterprise for the revelations it had uncovered, including those involving Boxill.

So the university did an about-face: It defended her, and backed away from the evidence it had used to fire her. Responding to the NCAA’s charge that Boxill had given impermissible assistance to players, the university argued that her alleged offenses — which it had broadly cited in her termination letter — were “relatively modest.” It went email by email, echoing Boxill’s explanations for each bit of alleged misconduct, though noting that in some cases she had shown “poor judgment.”

Boxill was no longer a bad actor to be exiled. She was, according to the university, “a respected, full-time faculty member,” “an expert in the field of sports ethics,” and “exactly the kind of person universities routinely trust to educate their students.”

The strategy worked. The NCAA cleared Boxill of wrongdoing and spared the university — which insisted no academic fraud had been committed — of all penalties. With an unsavory episode behind it, the university was finally able to move on. Boxill wasn’t.

This essay has been adapted from Discredited: The UNC Scandal and College Athletics’ Amateur Ideal.