CHAPEL HILL, N.C. _ A little more than three months after the NCAA charged UNC-Chapel Hill with five major violations stemming from its long-running academic scandal, the university lodged a strenuous argument against the most serious allegations and questioned the core of the NCAA's case.
On Tuesday, the university released a public version of its response, the next step in an NCAA investigation into a scheme of classes advertised as lectures that never met and required only a paper that yielded an easy grade. Other bogus classes were independent studies that weren't monitored by a professor.
The crux of UNC's argument: The classes at the heart of the scandal, which some critics have described as the worst academic fraud case in college sports history, aren't subject to NCAA jurisdiction, and neither are the problems those classes created.
Therefore, UNC argues, the charges of a lack of institutional control and a failure to monitor _ the two most serious allegations facing the university _ are without merit.
UNC argues that its case is bolstered by the NCAA enforcement staff's treatment of the bogus classes. The NCAA has never found the existence of those classes _ the subject of multiple investigations _ to constitute an NCAA violation.
The university also alleges that the NCAA in 2011 knew details about the problems in the African and Afro-American Studies courses the university has described as "anomalous." UNC then was in the midst of a separate NCAA investigation into impermissible benefits and academic misconduct within the football program.
According to UNC's response, the NCAA knew about "the irregularity of class meeting times, a lack of professor oversight, and grading irregularities" in the AFAM classes at the heart of the investigation. The NCAA decided then to do nothing about those classes, which endured from 1993 to 2011.
"Ultimately," UNC's lawyers wrote in the response it submitted earlier this week, "the NCAA concluded that it had conducted a sufficient investigation, that no NCAA bylaws had been violated by academic irregularities in the Department, and that the Notice of Allegations did not need to be amended."
Yet knowledge about the depth of the problems within the AFAM department expanded considerably after 2011, with reports about the scope of the bogus classes, that some of them were filled with athletes, and about African studies chairman Julius Nyangoro's cozy relationship with academic support staffers for athletes.
After Nyang'oro was indicted for taking money to teach a class that never met, the NCAA decided in June 2014 to reopen its investigation.
