NCAA commission calls for reforms in wake of UNC scandal

NCAA President Mark Emmert set up a special commission in October to reform college basketball amid a headline-grabbing FBI probe that found undisclosed payments to assistant coaches and recruits by apparel companies and others seeking to curry favor with top athletes.

But days later, another firestorm erupted: The NCAA’s infractions committee released a decision saying it could not punish UNC-Chapel Hill for more than a decade of classes that had no instruction and were largely created and graded by a secretary that helped keep hundreds of athletes eligible to play sports, including members of the 2005 men’s basketball championship team. Why? Because UNC said the classes were legitimate, and non-athletes also benefited.

So, one of the questions leading up to Wednesday’s release of the commission’s report was whether it would take up the issues raised by the UNC scandal. It did.

“The NCAA must have jurisdiction to address academic fraud and misconduct to the extent that it affects student-athletes’ eligibility,” commission chairwoman Condoleezza Rice said in prepared remarks. “Member institutions can no longer be permitted to defend a fraud or misconduct case on the grounds that all students, not just athletes, were permitted to ‘benefit’ from that fraud or misconduct.”

Rice did not specifically mention UNC, but the details closely matched the particulars of the scandal, which involved roughly 180 classes listed as lecture style, but never met, plus hundreds of independent studies that had no instruction. An investigation led by Kenneth Wainstein, a former top U.S. Justice Department official, said the “shadow curriculum” of bogus independent studies began in 1993, and expanded to lecture classes in 1999.

The classes weren’t outed until 2011, when The News & Observer obtained a transcript from a football player kicked off the team. The classes had gone undiscovered by NCAA investigators looking into the football program over perks from agents and impermissible academic help from a tutor.

More than 3,100 students took at least one class, with athletes comprising nearly half of the enrollments. Wainstein’s report showed the classes were especially popular with football and men’s basketball players, and athletes made up the majority of students taking multiple classes.

The commission’s report referred to the classes in a footnote related to schools’ efforts to keep athletes academically eligible. The footnote cited the infractions committee’s decision, and said it held that “only member institutions – not the NCAA – can determine whether academic fraud has occurred and that student-athletes did not receive extra benefits because the sham courses at issue were available to all students.”

The footnote also cited infractions committee penalties for recent academic misconduct cases at Notre Dame and Georgia Southern to make the case that the NCAA is being inconsistent.

“This situation creates another opening for corruption – the manipulation and dilution of academic standards by school officials, along with other academic misconduct. A series of recent cases involve this phenomenon. Other cases illustrate the lack of clarity about the NCAA’s rules and the likely punishment for academic misconduct, as well as inconsistency in the NCAA’s application of the rules,” the report said.

Shortly after the infractions committee’s decision on UNC, the Knight Commission called for Rice’s commission to take up reforms to address what it saw as a loophole in policing academic misconduct. Two of the members of Rice’s commission, former NBA star David Robinson and Georgia Institute of Technology President G.P. ‘Bud’ Peterson, are also on the Knight Commission.

Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins is also on the Rice commission. He had blasted the NCAA infractions process after Notre Dame’s football team had a season as runner-up champions vacated in the academic misconduct case, while UNC escaped punishment.

The Rice commission also called for investigations and adjudications of infractions cases to be handled by independent “arms,” and for tougher penalties in serious ‘level 1’ violations.

Emmert has said he wants to the Rice commission’s recommendations enacted before the start of next season. Whether member schools will want to go along with recommendations that give the NCAA more authority over academic matters is unclear. Many times over the years, the membership has asserted schools have the say over what constitutes legitimate classwork.

In UNC’s case, that included the infractions committee sidestepping an accreditor’s finding that the university violated standards such as academic integrity, program content and control of college athletics. Correspondence between UNC and the accreditor showed the university had called the classes “academic fraud.”

During the infractions hearing, UNC distanced itself from that correspondence, calling it a “typo,” the infractions report said.

This story was originally published April 25, 2018 at 1:19 PM with the headline "NCAA commission calls for reforms in wake of UNC scandal."