CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — A blistering report into an academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina released Wednesday found that for nearly two decades two employees in the African and Afro-American Studies department ran a “shadow curriculum” of hundreds of fake classes that never met but for which students, many of them Tar Heels athletes, routinely received A’s and B’s.
Nearly half the students in the classes were athletes, the report found, often deliberately steered there by academic counselors to bolster their worrisomely low grade-point averages and to allow them to continue playing on North Carolina’s teams. The existence of the classes — though not necessarily how blatantly nonexistent they were — was common knowledge among the academic counselors, and in some cases among coaches of the university’s sports teams, according to the report prepared by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former official at the United States Justice Department and now a partner of the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
The university said it would release Mr. Wainstein’s report at a news conference Wednesday.
The report is the latest in a series of investigations into the scandal, which first came to light three years ago. The revelations have cast a decidedly unflattering light on U.N.C., Chapel Hill, which has long boasted of its ability to adhere to high academic standards while running a premier sports program. Until now, the university has been at pains to emphasize that the scandal was a purely academic one; on Wednesday, for the first time, it acknowledged that it was also an athletic one, with athletes being steered specifically into and benefiting disproportionately from the fraudulent classes.
The N.C.A.A. closed its initial investigation into the case, agreeing with North Carolina’s contention that the scandal was an academic one and had nothing to do with the sports program, but it has reopened it in light of the continuing revelations. North Carolina’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, has said that the university had already put myriad structures in place to ensure that something like this could never happen again, and she planned to announce further reforms Wednesday.
Though the report found no evidence that high-level university officials knew about the fake classes, it faulted the university for missing numerous warning signs about what was going on and said it had “failed to conduct any meaningful oversight” over the increasingly out-of-control African studies department.
Some 3,100 students took the phantom classes, most of which were created and graded solely by a single university employee, Deborah Crowder, a nonacademic who worked as the department’s administrator and who told Mr. Wainstein she had been motivated by a desire to help struggling athletes. Over time, she was joined in the scheme by the chairman of the department, Julius Nyang’oro, who became the professor of record for many of the fake classes, although he generally left the details up to Ms. Crowder.
Ms. Crowder required that students turn in only a single paper, but the papers were often largely plagiarized or padded out with “fluff” like page after page of quotations, the report said. She generally gave the papers A’s or B’s after a cursory glance. The classes were widely known as “paper classes” because of the one requirement for completion.
As an indication of how important these classes were to the Tar Heels’ football program — which generates a huge amount of money for the university — the report detailed what happened in 2008 after word spread that Ms. Crowder planned to retire the next year, a development that would essentially put an end to the scheme.
First, Cynthia Reynolds, associate director of the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes, sent a panicked email to Andre Williams, a football operations coordinator, urging him to make sure that all of the football players turned in their papers before Ms. Crowder’s departure. “If the guys papers are not in,” the email read, “I would expect D’s or C’s at best. Most need better than that.”
In November 2009, Ms. Reynolds and other members of the academic support program convened a meeting of the football coaches to discuss how the departure of Ms. Crowder would affect the players’ academic standing. The counselors and coaches were “painfully aware,” the report said, “that Crowder’s retirement would require the whole football program to adjust to a new reality of having to meet academic requirements with real academic work.”
In the meeting, two members of the football counseling staff explained to the assembled coaches that the classes “had played a large role in keeping underprepared and/or unmotivated players eligible to play.” To emphasize this point, they presented a PowerPoint demonstration in which one of the slides asked and then answered the question, “What was part of the solution in the past?”
“We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which … they didn’t go to class … they didn’t have to take notes, have to stay awake … they didn’t have to meet with professors … they didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material,” the slide said. “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!”
Indeed, the report said, “the fall 2009 semester — the first in over a decade without Ms. Crowder and her paper classes — resulted in the lowest football team G.P.A. in 10 years, 2.121.” Forty-eight players, it went on, earned semester G.P.A.'s of less than 2.0.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning, Ms. Folt, the U.N.C., Chapel Hill, chancellor, said that a reason the paper class scheme thrived for so long was that it was hard for anyone to imagine that something so beyond the pale could happen at all.
“It was such a shock that it was hard for people to fathom,” she said.