re: UNC Admits Academic Fraud: Lack Of Institutional Controls, *NCAA Issues 3rd NOA

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With the Fall classes starting, any updates on if UNC will get off?

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North Carolina is investigating a hazing incident among members of the football team, according to a report from Yahoo Sports.

Sources told Yahoo the incident, which allegedly occurred during the first week of August, escalated into a "group assault" of a teammate.

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Redshirt freshman walk-on wide receiver Jackson Boyer was concussed in the alleged incident, which reportedly took place with multiple teammates in his room at the Chapel Hill hotel the team was staying at during preseason camp.

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Chapel Hill, North Carolina (CNN) -- For 18 years, thousands of students at the prestigious University of North Carolina took fake "paper classes," and advisers funneled athletes into the program to keep them eligible, according to a scathing independent report released Wednesday.
"These counselors saw the paper classes and the artificially high grades they yielded as key to helping some student-athletes remain eligible," Kenneth Wainstein wrote in his report.

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In all, the report estimates, at least 3,100 students took the paper classes, but adds the number "very likely falls far short of the true number."
For the first time since the scandal first came to light five years ago, UNC admitted that the wrongdoing went further than academics and involved its athletic programs.
In fact, Folt said, "it was a university issue."

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According to the report, one former head football coach, John Bunting, admitted to knowing of the paper classes and his successor, Butch Davis, also admitted some knowledge. Current men's basketball coach Roy Williams is steadfast that he did not know, Wainstein said.

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For five years, UNC has insisted the paper classes were the doing of one rogue professor: the department chair of the African American studies program, Julius Nyang'oro. Wainstein's report spread the blame much further.

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Wainstein did find that five counselors actively used paper classes, calling them "GPA boosters," and that at least two counselors, one in football, suggested to Crowder the grade an athlete needed to receive to be able to continue to play.

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The report, the third and most comprehensive produced in the matter, said some academic advisers in the school's Academic Support Program for Student Athletes had ties to Crowder and let her know how high a student's grade needed to be to maintain a 2.0 GPA to be eligible to play. It also said that those advisers pushed Crowder to make exceptions for athletes, including allowing them to enroll in classes after the registration period had ended.

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The report also detailed a 2009 meeting that academic advisers held with the North Carolina football staff. The meeting, which came as Crowder was retiring, included a slide that noted that the classes were "part of the solution in the past" and allowed athletes not to go to class, not to take notes, not to meet with professors and not to engage with the material.

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Investigators said they talked once to former UNC academic adviser Mary Willingham, who questioned the literacy level of Tar Heels athletes and said UNC had committed academic misconduct before leaving the job in 2010. A report that men's basketball coach Roy Williams told Willingham her only job was to keep his players eligible was not verified; Williams said he didn't believe he had met Willingham, and Willingham, who filed a civil suit against the university in June, did not talk to investigators for a second time to answer that question.

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Roy Williams: 'We tried to do the right thing'

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told CNN that her group can't take away degrees.

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A former University of North Carolina football player has become the first to sue the university over an 18-year academic scandal that kept athletes eligible to play sports by taking classes that never met.

Mike McAdoo was a football player who lost his eligibility in 2011 when he was accused of getting too much help with a paper, and was one of the first athletes revealed to have taken part in "paper classes," for which the only requirement was completing a single paper.

Now he's suing the university in federal court, saying UNC broke its promise to give him an education in return for playing sports. His lawsuit is a class-action suit that the other 3,100 students who enrolled in the fake classes -- nearly half of whom are athletes -- could easily join.

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"From selection of a major to selection of courses, the UNC football program controlled football student-athletes' academic track, with the sole purpose of ensuring that football student-athletes were eligible to participate in athletics, rather than actually educating them," says his lawsuit, filed Thursday by the law firms of Ferguson, Chambers & Sumter in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Mehri and Skalet in Washington, D.C.

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"When the coaches and academic staff came to my house all the way in Tennessee, you know they, they wasn't even talking football, they was talking academics," he told CNN earlier this year. "So they were saying, 'You know what, we can't promise your son that he's going to go to the NFL, but one thing that we can promise him is that he will get a college degree.'"

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McAdoo told CNN he had expressed interest in studying criminal justice, but was told on his first day of scheduling that he had to pick from three majors that fit his football schedule -- Exercise and Sport Science, Communications, and African-American Studies, where the paper class scandal existed. McAdoo said his pre-determined schedule included some of the paper classes.

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McAdoo's lawsuit could potentially uncover even more than the damning Wainstein investigation, which was by far the most thorough and provided a slew of information that had previously been discounted by UNC.

The difference is in the power of subpoena.

McAdoo's lawyers will be able to depose people who declined to talk to Wainstein -- potentially key participants whom Wainstein called out for refusing to cooperate, like the former director of football Cynthia Reynolds and the former interim head football coach Everett Withers.

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Willingham, who is suing UNC in a whistleblower-related lawsuit, said she also hopes to depose people who were not interviewed by Wainstein's team, such as members of the board of trustees.

"There's still a lot of denial, and Wainstein did not conduct his investigation with anyone under oath, nor did he have subpoena power," Willingham said.

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"She told me rape is like football, and if you look back on the game what would you have done differently in that situation," one of the women who filed a federal complaint with the Department of Education against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told investigators.

Pino and Clark — along with two other students — filed a 34-page federal civil-rights complaint in January against UNC, claiming the school mishandled a sexual assault case and dropped the ball when it came to sexual assault and harassment complaints, and it's prompted a federal investigation into the university that began earlier this month. (A spokesperson for the chancellor's office at UNC told The Atlantic Wire that it did not have immediate comment regarding the university's response, but that they would provide information soon. Update: See the university response below.)


Pino and Clark and the new federal investigation don't represent the first controversial rape case at UNC. You might remember Landen Gambill, a UNC student who could be facing expulsion for violating the school's honor code for intimidating her alleged rapist, an ex-boyfriend. Gambill never named him, but after her case was dismissed by the school's honor court —sexual assault was removed from its jurisdiction in 2012 — she went public. The Daily Tarheel has Gambill's account of her interaction with officials, which once again starts to sound more like victim-blaming from within the administration, and less like sympathy.

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