Jan Boxill, the ethicist and former faculty chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose apparent participation in the shocking academic fraud there left observers amazed, says all the allegations against her are false.
In a letter responding to the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Tuesday, Ms. Boxill’s lawyer, Randall M. Roden, said the claims made against her in a report by a former federal prosecutor, Kenneth L. Wainstein, were untrue.
“It did not happen,” the defiant letter reads. “Not one of the allegations against Jan Boxill is true,” Mr. Roden continued, referencing allegations made by the NCAA, which relied on the so-called Wainstein report.
That report portrayed Ms. Boxill as a key participant in a fake-classes scheme that apparently spanned decades and involved thousands of students and athletes and many employees in several departments.
The claims against Ms. Boxill — that she wrote sections of students’ papers and helped determine their grades for the fake classes, for instance — shocked her colleagues after they were publicized, and continued to dumbfound observers in academe who wondered what had happened. She resigned in 2015 after the university moved to fire her.
According to Mr. Roden, the claims against Ms. Boxill were the result of shoddy work by Mr. Wainstein’s team. “This entire case is based on assumptions that are not correct and are not supported by a single witness,” Mr. Roden writes, adding that emails the report held up as smoking guns had been misinterpreted.
Meanwhile, UNC-Chapel Hill supplied its own response to the NCAA’s Notice of Allegations, which found that the university had lacked “institutional control” over athletics but mentioned only the women’s basketball team by name.
In its response, the university said the NCAA had overstepped its authority in seeking to punish the university for academic problems. “This case involves core institutional issues — academic issues — not covered by the NCAA’s bylaws,” an executive summary of the university’s response read.
