After the Wainstein Report was released to the public, Infante offered updated commentary, which was originally published at 30mileradius.com. The article is no longer available at the original URL, but can be found archived by the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine.".
The NCAA hasn't pursued a case of academic misconduct against UNC. Instead, the Enforcement Staff have presented allegations of impermissible academic benefits and lack of institutional control. With the Committee on Infractions (COI) hearing panel giving hints that it sees this as an academic misconduct vice impermissible benefits case, Infante's 2-yr old article remains relevant today.
Questions of Institutional Control Eclipse Academic Fraud Issues at UNC after Wainstein Report
Today Kenneth Wainstein released the results of his investigation into North Carolina’s academic scandal. This was the most thorough of the many investigations into allegations of academic fraud in UNC’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies. The findings are a broad condemnation of both the actions of Debby Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro as well as the university’s oversight of both the AFAM and athletic departments.
With the NCAA reopening its investigation a few months ago, attention now turns to what the association may do with this new information. Wainstein’s access to Crowder and Nyang’oro prompted the resumption of the NCAA investigation and his report advances our understanding of what happened at UNC much further than any of the previous attempts. The short answer is it is still hard to predict what the NCAA might do. But what the NCAA must do is much clearer.
Did UNC Commit Academic Fraud?
What can be said definitively is that UNC had more academic misconduct violations than were in the 2011 Committee on Infractions report. There are multiple anecdotes in the report that rise to either clear levels of academic misconduct by any definition of the term or all the way to “arranging false credit or transcripts”. For instance, the case where Crowder provided credit when even the academic advisor in the athletic department acknowledged that the paper was “recycled”. Or the acceptance of recommendations from athletic department staff about grades athletes needed in order to stay eligible.
There is also the related issue of extra benefits. The “add-on students” and “bifurcated classes” identified by Wainstein are examples of this. In both cases, athletes received a special arrangement not offered to the general student body. In add-on classes, they were added to the course without the instructor’s knowledge and given credit and a high grade without completing the work done by the rest of the students in the section. In bifurcated courses, essentially the same thing occurred although the instructor knew about it.
The trouble may be in proving this. Crowder and Nyang’oro confess to conduct that is an obvious NCAA violation. But in many of these cases, they cannot recall the student-athlete involved and that student-athlete cannot be identified. Typically when you see “Football Student-Athlete 1″ in a COI report, it is to protect the privacy of the athlete, not because the athlete could not be identified. It is also a big jump to an allegation that lists “Football Student-Athletes 1-6 or 7, maybe 8″.
But that does not settle the matter of the larger fraud, the offering of the paper courses themselves to athletes and the steering of athletes to those courses by staff members in the athletic department. The findings in the Wainstein report are a big step toward the first part of how the NCAA approaches academic fraud violation: finding a violation of university academic policies by a student-athlete or staff member. That now seems obvious and the Wainstein report establishes a record of this.
Even if we assume that the paper courses alone do not constitute “arranging for fraudulent credit”, it now should be much simpler to go back and find out which athletes competed under an “erroneous declaration of eligibility”. That is, which athletes, but for the high grade they received in one of the paper classes, would have been academically ineligible.
So to recap, the worst conduct in the report, giving an athlete credit despite knowing that they submitted an old paper or slipping athletes into a course then changing the professor’s grade, still seems like a stretch to end up before the Committee on Infractions. But now proving that the core of the scandal, the paper courses themselves, were an NCAA violation appears much easier for the enforcement staff.
Did UNC Lack Institutional Control?
More than academic fraud, the Wainstein report makes the case that UNC lacked institutional control over the AFAM department and how the athletic department interacted with it. But the heart of the institutional control issue is not with athletics, it is with the AFAM department. The NCAA does not require that institutions have proper control over their academic departments, that’s the job of an accreditation agency.
There remains a good argument that the Wainstein report was not necessary for the NCAA to get involved again on the academic fraud issue. The report fleshes out the paper courses scheme but the bones were known a long time ago. Courses acknowledged as academically unsound + athletes who needed the courses to be eligible and subsequently competed = an academic misconduct violation. That might be a broad interpretation of the Ed Column I’ve been referencing but not a radical one.
For a charge of lack of institutional control however, the degree of athletic department involvement is vital. Imagine an alternate reality where the UNC athletic department was completely unaware of the true nature and purpose of the paper courses. That this was nothing more than academic advisors suggesting easy courses to athletes. In that case, a charge of lack of institution control would be tantamount to saying the athletic department is responsible for exercising institutional control over an academic unit.
That is exactly what happened though and why a charge of lack of institutional control is so clear cut. Because of the poor oversight, athletics staff members were able to exert far too much influence over the AFAM department. Specific instances include the emails requesting certain grades, the special course arrangement for athletes, the refusal to enroll some athletes in the paper courses without a referral from an academic advisor and, most egregious, the continuation of the paper courses after Crowder’s retirement at the instance of the football academic advisors.
This is such a slam dunk case of lack of institutional control that I believe it does not even need the underlying academic fraud violation. Such a case is essentially unprecedented save the Penn State case and that was exceptional in many other ways. But it is warranted here. The NCAA cannot allow an athletic department to have the type of sway over the academic functions of the university that UNC’s did. This goes beyond athletics to the over 1,500 non-athlete students that took the bogus classes as well, albeit it not without some fault of their own in many cases.
There are other NCAA infractions cases, Baylor, Colorado, Penn State if you want to include it, that are far beyond anything yet unearthed at UNC. But those cases are notable for criminal activity, making any NCAA rules violations seem trivial despite the severe penalties in each case. The relationship between UNC’s athletics and AFAM departments strikes at the core of the NCAA. It offers fuel to all of the NCAA’s critics on both sides: that athletics has corrupted the mission of higher education and that the education offered to athletes is a ruse used to justify a system that exploits them commercially. The NCAA cannot allow that to go unpunished.
So What Will Happen to UNC?
Infractions cases remain notoriously hard to predict. We do know a couple of things about UNC though. First, UNC will not be considered a repeat violator based on this report. The paper courses stopped in 2011 and the Committee on Infractions report was issued March 12, 2012. That means all the possible major violations occurred before the start of the repeat violator period, which for UNC runs from March 12, 2012 through March 11, 2017. We also know that under the new enforcement structure, UNC will receive the lesser of the penalties between the old and new systems. In practice this normally means the old penalties.
Even in a best case scenario, it is hard to see UNC avoiding another major infractions case at this point. A combination of a relatively strict interpretation of the standards for an academic fraud violation, the difficulty of proving some of the worst findings in the report to the Committee on Infractions’ standards, and a different view than mine of the severity of the institutional control issues would limit the scope of the case. In that scenario, the biggest penalty UNC may face is a lengthy probation, possibly with the odd scholarship reduction, vacation of records, or recruiting restriction thrown in.
In a worst case scenario, the enforcement staff is able to prove a long and continuous series of academic fraud violations and treats the institutional control issues as serious as I have. The best recent precedent in that situation would be the Florida State case from 2009. That case is one of the few involving numerous academic fraud violations spread over a number of sports without other violations like extra benefits or recruiting inducements. In that case, Florida State vacated records and received relatively small scholarship reductions across a number of sports.
In a worst case scenario, UNC could be guilty of far more academic fraud than Florida State and be found to lack institutional control while FSU was only charged with failure to monitor. Increased penalties might mean significant scholarships reductions in some sports (5-10 in football, 3 in basketball) and the possibility of a postseason ban, potentially multiple years in some sports.
Or it could be something in between. In any case, expect lengthy show-cause orders for the involved individuals. The other guarantee is that any penalties beyond probation will be controversial in this case, despite the public clamor for an NCAA investigation. Not only will the penalties punish innocent athletes and coaches like many NCAA sanctions do, but in this case even the athletes involved were victims.
But to reiterate, I do not believe this is a case where the NCAA can say that the people involved in the wrongdoing are gone, so the institution can avoid serious consequences. If the NCAA approaches this case as one where athletics staff members managed to gain any level of control over an academic department, it must send a message that it recognizes how the UNC scandal cuts to the heart of college athletics and that it will not be tolerated now or in the future.
- This might also be an example of “arranging for fradulent credit or transcripts” that makes for the clearest violation of NCAA academic fraud rules. ↩
- This version of reality was the basis for the findings in some of the previous investigations. ↩
Today Kenneth Wainstein released the results of his investigation into North Carolina’s academic scandal. This was the most thorough of the many investigations into allegations of academic fraud in UNC’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies. The findings are a broad condemnation of both the actions of Debby Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro as well as the university’s oversight of both the AFAM and athletic departments.
With the NCAA reopening its investigation a few months ago, attention now turns to what the association may do with this new information. Wainstein’s access to Crowder and Nyang’oro prompted the resumption of the NCAA investigation and his report advances our understanding of what happened at UNC much further than any of the previous attempts. The short answer is it is still hard to predict what the NCAA might do. But what the NCAA must do is much clearer.
Did UNC Commit Academic Fraud?
What can be said definitively is that UNC had more academic misconduct violations than were in the 2011 Committee on Infractions report. There are multiple anecdotes in the report that rise to either clear levels of academic misconduct by any definition of the term or all the way to “arranging false credit or transcripts”. For instance, the case where Crowder provided credit when even the academic advisor in the athletic department acknowledged that the paper was “recycled”. Or the acceptance of recommendations from athletic department staff about grades athletes needed in order to stay eligible.
There is also the related issue of extra benefits. The “add-on students” and “bifurcated classes” identified by Wainstein are examples of this. In both cases, athletes received a special arrangement not offered to the general student body. In add-on classes, they were added to the course without the instructor’s knowledge and given credit and a high grade without completing the work done by the rest of the students in the section. In bifurcated courses, essentially the same thing occurred although the instructor knew about it.
The trouble may be in proving this. Crowder and Nyang’oro confess to conduct that is an obvious NCAA violation. But in many of these cases, they cannot recall the student-athlete involved and that student-athlete cannot be identified. Typically when you see “Football Student-Athlete 1″ in a COI report, it is to protect the privacy of the athlete, not because the athlete could not be identified. It is also a big jump to an allegation that lists “Football Student-Athletes 1-6 or 7, maybe 8″.
But that does not settle the matter of the larger fraud, the offering of the paper courses themselves to athletes and the steering of athletes to those courses by staff members in the athletic department. The findings in the Wainstein report are a big step toward the first part of how the NCAA approaches academic fraud violation: finding a violation of university academic policies by a student-athlete or staff member. That now seems obvious and the Wainstein report establishes a record of this.
Even if we assume that the paper courses alone do not constitute “arranging for fraudulent credit”, it now should be much simpler to go back and find out which athletes competed under an “erroneous declaration of eligibility”. That is, which athletes, but for the high grade they received in one of the paper classes, would have been academically ineligible.
So to recap, the worst conduct in the report, giving an athlete credit despite knowing that they submitted an old paper or slipping athletes into a course then changing the professor’s grade, still seems like a stretch to end up before the Committee on Infractions. But now proving that the core of the scandal, the paper courses themselves, were an NCAA violation appears much easier for the enforcement staff.
Did UNC Lack Institutional Control?
More than academic fraud, the Wainstein report makes the case that UNC lacked institutional control over the AFAM department and how the athletic department interacted with it. But the heart of the institutional control issue is not with athletics, it is with the AFAM department. The NCAA does not require that institutions have proper control over their academic departments, that’s the job of an accreditation agency.
There remains a good argument that the Wainstein report was not necessary for the NCAA to get involved again on the academic fraud issue. The report fleshes out the paper courses scheme but the bones were known a long time ago. Courses acknowledged as academically unsound + athletes who needed the courses to be eligible and subsequently competed = an academic misconduct violation. That might be a broad interpretation of the Ed Column I’ve been referencing but not a radical one.
For a charge of lack of institutional control however, the degree of athletic department involvement is vital. Imagine an alternate reality where the UNC athletic department was completely unaware of the true nature and purpose of the paper courses. That this was nothing more than academic advisors suggesting easy courses to athletes. In that case, a charge of lack of institution control would be tantamount to saying the athletic department is responsible for exercising institutional control over an academic unit.
That is exactly what happened though and why a charge of lack of institutional control is so clear cut. Because of the poor oversight, athletics staff members were able to exert far too much influence over the AFAM department. Specific instances include the emails requesting certain grades, the special course arrangement for athletes, the refusal to enroll some athletes in the paper courses without a referral from an academic advisor and, most egregious, the continuation of the paper courses after Crowder’s retirement at the instance of the football academic advisors.
This is such a slam dunk case of lack of institutional control that I believe it does not even need the underlying academic fraud violation. Such a case is essentially unprecedented save the Penn State case and that was exceptional in many other ways. But it is warranted here. The NCAA cannot allow an athletic department to have the type of sway over the academic functions of the university that UNC’s did. This goes beyond athletics to the over 1,500 non-athlete students that took the bogus classes as well, albeit it not without some fault of their own in many cases.
There are other NCAA infractions cases, Baylor, Colorado, Penn State if you want to include it, that are far beyond anything yet unearthed at UNC. But those cases are notable for criminal activity, making any NCAA rules violations seem trivial despite the severe penalties in each case. The relationship between UNC’s athletics and AFAM departments strikes at the core of the NCAA. It offers fuel to all of the NCAA’s critics on both sides: that athletics has corrupted the mission of higher education and that the education offered to athletes is a ruse used to justify a system that exploits them commercially. The NCAA cannot allow that to go unpunished.
So What Will Happen to UNC?
Infractions cases remain notoriously hard to predict. We do know a couple of things about UNC though. First, UNC will not be considered a repeat violator based on this report. The paper courses stopped in 2011 and the Committee on Infractions report was issued March 12, 2012. That means all the possible major violations occurred before the start of the repeat violator period, which for UNC runs from March 12, 2012 through March 11, 2017. We also know that under the new enforcement structure, UNC will receive the lesser of the penalties between the old and new systems. In practice this normally means the old penalties.
Even in a best case scenario, it is hard to see UNC avoiding another major infractions case at this point. A combination of a relatively strict interpretation of the standards for an academic fraud violation, the difficulty of proving some of the worst findings in the report to the Committee on Infractions’ standards, and a different view than mine of the severity of the institutional control issues would limit the scope of the case. In that scenario, the biggest penalty UNC may face is a lengthy probation, possibly with the odd scholarship reduction, vacation of records, or recruiting restriction thrown in.
In a worst case scenario, the enforcement staff is able to prove a long and continuous series of academic fraud violations and treats the institutional control issues as serious as I have. The best recent precedent in that situation would be the Florida State case from 2009. That case is one of the few involving numerous academic fraud violations spread over a number of sports without other violations like extra benefits or recruiting inducements. In that case, Florida State vacated records and received relatively small scholarship reductions across a number of sports.
In a worst case scenario, UNC could be guilty of far more academic fraud than Florida State and be found to lack institutional control while FSU was only charged with failure to monitor. Increased penalties might mean significant scholarships reductions in some sports (5-10 in football, 3 in basketball) and the possibility of a postseason ban, potentially multiple years in some sports.
Or it could be something in between. In any case, expect lengthy show-cause orders for the involved individuals. The other guarantee is that any penalties beyond probation will be controversial in this case, despite the public clamor for an NCAA investigation. Not only will the penalties punish innocent athletes and coaches like many NCAA sanctions do, but in this case even the athletes involved were victims.
But to reiterate, I do not believe this is a case where the NCAA can say that the people involved in the wrongdoing are gone, so the institution can avoid serious consequences. If the NCAA approaches this case as one where athletics staff members managed to gain any level of control over an academic department, it must send a message that it recognizes how the UNC scandal cuts to the heart of college athletics and that it will not be tolerated now or in the future.
- This might also be an example of “arranging for fradulent credit or transcripts” that makes for the clearest violation of NCAA academic fraud rules. ↩
- This version of reality was the basis for the findings in some of the previous investigations. ↩
