It was allegation No. 5 in the May 2015 Notice of Allegations issued to UNC-Chapel Hill (Case No. 00231):
The NCAA's LOIC charge is commonly misunderstood; and, in discussions and debate of UNC's case, this error has been quite evident in the months since UNC posted the NOA for public release.
It seems that Doc Kennedy of Tar Heel Blog may have gotten the ball rolling with his June 4th, 2015 article: Four Things We Learned from the NOA. Bradley Bethel followed a day later on his Coaching the Mind blog: UNC's Lack of Institutional Control: Not an Athletics-Driven Scandal.
Kennedy and Bethel -- and the countless others who have argued the same point that the LOIC allegation charged the UNC College of Arts & Sciences and not the Department of Athletics -- make a fundamental error, misunderstanding what the NCAA means by LOIC. I bring this up because in the past few weeks since NCAA President Mark Emmert made reference to an amended Notice of Allegation being expected soon in the UNC case, there has been a resurgence of opinions expressed saying LOIC was charged against the academic portion of the institution and not the athletics department.
In a nutshell, here are the NCAA's own words in bullet format about what LOIC means:
None of those duties are delegated to the faculty or any office within the College of Arts & Sciences. To say that "UNC’s alleged LOIC was the result of a complacent Arts & Sciences (A&S) administration" is wrong and misunderstands what the NCAA means by LOIC.
There truly would be "something a little unique" had the "NCAA charged the academic side of UNC's house with failure to monitor Boxill and failure to regulate the AFAM mess." But it didn't.
What Kennedy, Bethel and so many others have focused on, in their defense of the athletics department and desire to assign total responsibility on "the academic side of UNC's house," is this passage from the NOA:
That is from the Allegation No. 5 LOIC language; however, it is not describing what action(s) resulted in the institution committing LOIC. It's relating the violating actions of the previous allegations to failures in how the University did (or didn't) respond or prepare.
LOIC is a compliance failure, not a failure to monitor; and if the University has delegated responsibility for compliance to the Athletics Department (which I believe 100% of NCAA member institutions do), then that's a failure of the Department of Athletics as an essential component of "institutional." Faculty leaders -- deans and department chairs -- are not responsible for:
At UNC-Chapel Hill, those responsibilities do belong to the Athletics Department.
The very fact that the problems were the result of the combined failures of the Athletics Department, the College of Arts & Sciences -- and most importantly, the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes (ASPSA) that straddled the bounderies of both departments -- is what makes the failure an institutional one. It's neither an academics-side only failure nor an athletics-only failure. It was both academic leadership + athletics leadership who failed. LOIC is not possible without a failure in athletics. If it truly had simply been a failure of the College of Arts & Sciences to monitor its staff, then Allegation No. 5 would not have been included. Attempting to argue that the NCAA was alleging LOIC of the "academic side of the house" and not the Athletics Department is -- well, forgive me for being blunt -- ignorant.
Now, I will say that IF Kennedy and Bethel are right and the NCAA actually DID intend for the NOA to convey the meaning they describe, then Kennedy would be absolutely right. It would be a unique and ground-breaking precedent-establishing use of the LOIC allegation, and the NCAA would be guilty of following a path incongruent with its entire enforcement history. If academic rigor is out of it's "wheelhouse," charging faculty with LOIC certainly is. I suppose, given the NCAA's enforcement and executive decision missteps in recent years, such a precedent might not be surprising.
And if that IS what the NCAA intended, then UNC would have an easy time arguing that the LOIC charge should be dropped. But there's no way that allegation can be allowed to stand and result in sanctions under that interpretation. Thus, if LOIC does survive any NOA revision and UNC is sanctioned, then it will have confirmed the standard and accepted understanding of the NCAA's meaning of LOIC.
