http://www.journalnow.com/news/state_re ... f6878.html
The Tarhicks keep shooting themselves in the foot. Here's another chapter and verse...
UNC faculty leader pushed rewrite of report to keep NCAA away
RALEIGH — Newly released correspondence shows a faculty leader at UNC Chapel Hill watered down a report into academic fraud to lessen the chances the NCAA would come back to campus.
The correspondence shows that hours before the report’s release on July 26, 2012, Faculty Council Chairman Jan Boxill sent the three faculty authors a last-minute email, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported. It suggested they rewrite a sentence that painted a picture of a department manager creating bogus classes to protect athletes’ eligibility to play sports.
The authors grudgingly agreed to it, and some key information disappeared from the final version.
Boxill wrote that the request came from other faculty on the council’s executive committee. “The worry is that this could further raise NCAA issues and that is not the intention,” she said in the email.
As the elected faculty leader, Boxill is one of UNC’s top academic officials. Rewriting a sentence that carried the suggestion of an athletic motive behind the scandal should not be the mission of a faculty, said the author of a book on college athletic scandals.
“The faculty committee should not anticipate the audience or implications, but rather fulfill the charge they undertook,” said John Thelin, an education professor at the University of Kentucky and author of “Games Colleges Play.”
Jay Smith, a UNC history professor who has been among the most vocal critics of the university’s handling of the scandal, said Boxill’s email confirmed his fears that UNC had not investigated vigorously.
“It seems consistent with what I have taken to be the university’s strategy all along, which is they wanted to come up with findings that seemed frank and candid, but which also carefully exclude any further NCAA investigation,” Smith said.
Boxill did not respond to interview requests. In email messages to The News & Observer, she said she only relayed the suggestions of others, but she would not identify who provided them.
“The concern of (Faculty Executive Committee) members was to make sure the facts were reported correctly without implications and innuendos we were not in a position to know,” she said.
The NCAA typically does not involve itself in academic fraud cases unless there is an intent to assist athletes above other students.
UNC athletics, particularly the football program, has been embroiled in scandal for nearly three years. The NCAA investigated improper benefits from agents and improper help from tutors, leading to a one-year bowl ban, scholarship reductions, the firing of football coach Butch Davis and early retirement for athletics director Dick Baddour.
Soon after, word of bogus classes for athletes and other students in the African and Afro-American Studies Department led to several other investigations and a criminal probe that is still unfinished.
The change in the faculty report was made after Boxill and several committee members had praised previous drafts. Seven of the faculty members on the committee in a position to review the report said they did not make the suggestion; the other five who were not authors of the report could not be reached.
The special faculty report followed an internal university review that found the longtime chairman of the African studies department, Julius Nyang’oro, and his department manager, Deborah Crowder, were involved in creating dozens of lecture-style classes that never met and required only a term paper turned in at the end. Athletes were heavily enrolled in the classes.
The university report said athletics were not behind the scandal because non-athletes were also enrolled and graded similarly. The faculty report was the first official review to raise concerns that athletics may have played a role in the scandal. The drafts leading up to the final report stated this more strongly.
They said: “Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from multiple interviews that the involvement of Deborah Crowder seems to have been that of an athletics supporter who was extremely close to personnel in Athletics, and who managed to use the system to help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and Afro-American Studies department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly taught.”
The final version reads: “Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from multiple interviews that a department staff member managed to use the system to help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and Afro-American Studies Department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly taught.”
Boxill said in an email to the N&O that some faculty executive committee members objected to describing Crowder as “extremely close” to athletic personnel. Boxill called it “vague without definite boundaries.”
