James Dean, the executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, flew to New York, arriving at Bloomberg headquarters on Saturday to deliver a heartening message. He wanted to do it in person. We made mistakes. Horrible things happened that Im ashamed of, he said over coffee in our newsroom, sparsely populated on a weekend. Student-athletes and other students, too, were hurt as a result of hundreds of phony classes offered beginning sometime in the 1990s. The integrity of our university was badly damaged.
Chapel Hills top executive for academics, its No. 2 official overall, came to New York to underscore that his fine universitya pillar of public education and a force in Division 1 sportshasnt been clear enough about what went wrong. He said he and his boss, Chancellor Carol Folt, are determined to change direction. To fix things, we have to understand what actually happened in the past, Dean added. He came to us because Bloomberg Businessweek has been examining the corruption of academics at Chapel Hillalthough such problems are not unique to the schoolas an illustration of how the drive to win lucrative college basketball and football championships undermines the education of undergraduates.
