The regional accrediting agency that accredits the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will launch a second review of the university in the wake of last month’s findings about the scope of an academic-fraud scandal at the institution, the News & Observer reported.
Belle S. Wheelan, president of the agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, said the new review would focus on the findings of an eight-month investigation led by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor who was hired by the university to get to the bottom of the scandal. His report, released on October 22, found that, over nearly two decades, more than 3,000 students had enrolled in and received grades for fake independent studies and no-show classes in African and Afro-American studies, and that administrators, coaches, and faculty members had either participated in the scheme or overlooked it.
The scope of the fraud is “huge,” Ms. Wheelan said. “It’s bigger than anything with which we’ve dealt before. … I just don’t know in what direction the board is going to go.”
In 2012, after reports of academic misconduct at Chapel Hill first emerged, the accreditor required extensive monitoring reports from the university. Chapel Hill’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, said the university had been in discussions with the accreditor since then and had sent it a copy of the Wainstein report.
While one college leader—Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College, in Minnesota—has argued that Chapel Hill’s accreditation should be suspended because of the magnitude of the fraud, Ms. Folt told the newspaper she thought that “was a pretty outrageous assertion from a president.”
“I think maybe he didn’t understand that we’ve already been through this with SACS in principle,” she said, “and spent three years undergoing major review and putting in more than 70 different processes that they have approved.”
The accreditor’s new review is likely to go on for months, the newspaper said, and its board probably won’t make any decisions until next June.
