UNC officials have said two people are to blame: former department chairman Julius Nyang’oro, who was forced to retire and now faces a criminal fraud charge; and his former department manager, Deborah Crowder, who retired in 2009. But records obtained and interviews of others connected to the scandal suggest the tutoring program for athletes knew the classes were suspect but used them to help keep athletes eligible. Athletes made up nearly half of the enrollments.
Since Jan. 1, the scandal has drawn sustained national coverage, leading to a new investigation led by Kenneth Wainstein. He has been tasked with trying to find out how the fraud began and why it went unchecked for more than a decade. He has not been given a timetable to complete his work.
____
UNC correspondence and an interview with a former adviser not affiliated with the academic support program for athletes show the advisers sent Crowder students in need of a class to graduate or to keep their full-time status. But the advisers did not show the level of awareness about the classes that the athletes’ tutoring program had.
Other evidence indicates Crowder wasn’t willing to help everyone get into the classes. One email suggested Crowder was struggling to manage all the students enrolling in independent studies classes and sought to ramp them down. An academic adviser said in the email that Crowder was concerned knowledge of the independent studies had “sort of gotten into the frat circuit.”
Two professors in the African studies department said in correspondence that they suspected Crowder favored athletes. Kenneth Janken told a special faculty review that Crowder was an athletics “booster.” Reginald Hildebrand, in an essay titled “Anatomy of a Scandal,” chastised The N&O and other media over their coverage of the scandal, but he also suspected Crowder had overstepped her authority to help athletes in ways that should have been called out by athletic officials.
“Over a thirty year period, our former department administrator accumulated far too much power, in part because the former chair was often disengaged,” Hildebrand wrote. “She used that power to become a major supplier of academic wiggle room, but she also helped all kinds of students in legitimate ways.”
Mary Willingham, the former learning specialist for athletes who blew the whistle on the no-show classes, said the academic support program for athletes used Crowder routinely to enroll athletes in the classes. When an athlete struggled academically or would be away from the university for long periods of time, such as a baseball player participating in a summer league, they contacted Crowder to get the athlete in a no-show class.
Read more here:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/04...owders-role-in-unc-scandal.html#storylink=cpy