When Paul Hardin, the president of Southern Methodist University in the early 1970s, found evidence that boosters were paying Mustang football players, Hardin reported it to the NCAA, which governs college sports.
Turns out, some of those boosters were on Hardin's board. Hardin wouldn't back down, and his board forced him out. Hardin later became the chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill, at least partly because of how he handled the cheating at SMU.
Hardin's actions at SMU provide a stark contrast to how UNC handled its most recent case before the NCAA. Hardin died about three months ago, several years after the passing of the once-prevalent notion that Carolina was a national leader in doing big-time college sports the right way.
Carol Folt, the chancellor in Chapel Hill, and her leadership team inherited a major scandal when Folt took the job in 2013. After reporting by The News & Observer, UNC investigations revealed no-show classes with an abundance of athletes going back to the 1990s.
Questions remained about the thoroughness of the investigations. To her credit, Folt hired a former high-ranking official from the U.S. Justice Department to get to the bottom of what happened.
He concluded in 2014 that a shadow curriculum of "corrupted" classes had been used to keep athletes eligible. There were no classes and no instruction. Typically, a single paper was required; it was graded by an office assistant who usually skimmed only the beginning and end, and gave high grades. Counselors steered athletes to the classes to maintain their eligibility.
Folt embraced the report. She promised changes (and delivered on them). She said the classes were both an academic and athletic problem.
UNC's accrediting agency said the classes were fraudulent and put Carolina on probation for a year. UNC said it "accepted full responsibility for the wrongdoing" and said "the academic fraud was long-standing and not limited" to two people.
