[From article]
More than 3,100 students — nearly half of them athletes — enrolled in classes they didn’t have to show up for and received artificially inflated grades in what an investigator called a “shadow curriculum” that lasted nearly two decades at the University of North Carolina.
The report released Wednesday by former high-ranking US Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein found more far-reaching academic fraud than previous investigations by the school and the NCAA.
[. . .]
findings of a systemic problem in the former African and Afro-American studies department could lead to NCAA sanctions and possible dismissal of additional UNC staff.
“I think it’s very clear that this is an academic, an athletic and a university problem,” Chancellor Carol Folt said.
The report outlined courses in the former African and Afro-American studies department that required only a research paper that was often scanned quickly and given an A or B regardless of the quality of work.
[. . .]
The report outlined how the fraud ran unchecked for so long, as well as how faculty and administration officials missed or looked past red flags such as unusually high numbers of independent study course enrollments.
It said athletics staffers steered athletes to classes that also became popular with fraternities and other everyday students looking for an easy grade.
“By the mid-2000s, these classes had become a primary — if not the primary — way that struggling athletes kept themselves from having eligibility problems,” the report said.
[. . .]
Nyang’oro was indicted in December on a felony fraud charge, though it was dropped after he agreed to cooperate with Wainstein’s probe. Crowder was never charged.
It was Crowder who started the paper classes as a way to help struggling students with “watered-down requirements” not long after Nyang’oro became chairman of the curriculum in 1992, according to the report. Though not a faculty member, she managed the courses by registering students, assigning them topics and then handing out high grades regardless of the work.
By 1999, in an apparent effort to work around the number of independent studies that students could take, Crowder began offering lecture classes that didn’t meet and were instead paper classes.
