News
Navigate

Related Content

Graduate Programs Earn Top 10 Rankings

April 11, 2024

UNC’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy has been ranked the top pharmacy school in the nation...

Read More

RJ Davis, Hubert Davis Claim Year-End Honors

March 12, 2024

  This article was updated March 28, 2024. Senior point guard RJ Davis and head...

Read More

New Undergraduate Major for School of Data Science and Society

March 12, 2024

Beginning this fall, the School of Data Science and Society will launch its first undergraduate...

Read More

Martin Says Fraud Isolated to African Studies Department

Posted on Feb. 1, 2013

Anyone who awaited the Martin Report with a fear of damaging new revelations in Carolina’s yearlong academic scandal can be assumed to be having happier holidays (depending on point of view) — the four-month investigation turned up very little of substance that had not been reported before, either by the University or the media.

Former Gov. James Martin and consultants from a firm with expertise in academic operations found nothing in the way of academic fraud outside the department of African and Afro-American studies; within that department, they found no one culpable other than former Chair Julius Nyang’oro and his administrative assistant, Deborah Crowder ’75 — both retired and nonresponsive to the media or investigators. Nyang’oro, as expected, came in for heavy criticism. “In this case, the department was the chairman,” Martin said, because others in AFAM “couldn’t get a look at what was going on.”

And despite the fact that it was a football player’s plagiarism and a suspicious-looking relationship between athletes and AFAM, Martin let the air out of worries about spillover into athletics — early in his report he repeated what was printed in it: “This was not an athletic scandal. It was an academic scandal, which is worse; but an isolated one.”

The Dec. 20 meeting of the Board of Trustees to make the report public saw a bizarre mix of the seriousness of academic misdoings and lighthearted laughter at Martin’s steady stream of wisecracks about life as a member of Congress and the realities he learned as a college chemistry professor.

Board Chair Wade Hargrove ’62 emphasized that Martin and a team from the national consulting firm Baker Tilly had been instructed to “leave no stone unturned” and “follow every lead.” They conducted 84 interviews with UNC faculty, staff, students and “other stakeholders.” They drew some on a previous in-house investigation headed by faculty members and based their own findings on a look at every course offering (172,580) that included undergraduate students in the past 18 years. It covered 68 academic terms, more than 12,500 instructors and more than 118,000 students.

Calling parts of the report “painful,” Hargrove said the academic issues “strike at the heart of the core values of the University. In facing and correcting these lapses, we honor more than 200 years of commitment by members of the faculty, the staff and the administration — past and present — to assure that every student who comes here receives a rigorous, challenging and meaningful academic experience. These irregularities must never be allowed to occur again.”

The results were reported Thursday afternoon to a panel of members of the UNC System Board of Governors, which also is probing the scandal. The State Bureau of Investigation is looking into whether Nyang’oro committed criminal fraud for accepting pay for classes he didn’t teach; this spring, the president of the Association of American Universities will help UNC examine how to shape the future relationship between academics and athletics.

Previous in-house examinations of AFAM turned up a multi-faceted web of academic fraud in which professors were absent, grades were changed without proper authorization and faculty oversight of students’ work was suspect.

At the center of the probe was Nyang’oro, the department’s first and only chair until he resigned as chair under pressure in August 2011. Nyang’oro joined the faculty in 1988 and became chair of the curriculum in 1992, then chaired the department for 15 years.

Here is what the Martin probe found:

  • Nyang’oro’s practice of getting approval for lecture courses that involved no lectures but a single paper due at the semester’s end started in 1997 — just months after AFAM was elevated from a curriculum to a department. Martin said there was no solid motive, but he suggested Nyang’oro could have been trying to boost enrollment in AFAM courses as a way to get the funds grow his faculty. The investigation found patterns of faculty no-show classes that peaked in 2005-06 and then dropped precipitously — to near zero by 2009. That’s the year that Crowder, who has been implicated in abetting Nyang’oro’s fraudulent practices, retired.
  • The Faculty Athletics Committee had become concerned about athletes’ enrollments in the classes — which Martin characterized as moderately higher than undergraduates as a whole — after similar practices at Auburn University raised a red flag. But no one at UNC followed up on those concerns.
  • A “dozen or so” courses listed as independent studies had instructor signatures that appeared to be forged. Martin said that eight AFAM faculty members had been unwittingly drawn into the issue of forged signatures but were innocent of malfeasance.
  • While AFAM was the only department found to have fraudulent practices, six others — communications studies, Romance languages, linguistics, dramatic art, exercise and sport science, and naval science — showed “curious features” that were found to have “rationally acceptable explanations.”
  • Enrollment in AFAM courses never was exclusive to athletes, but in some cases reached high percentages of the total.
  • A pattern of grade changes in AFAM — somewhat higher than the practice in other departments, did not appear to be isolated to athletes.
  • There was evidence that many students pay attention to departments that historically offered classes with a high percentage of top grades. That essentially was written off as student human nature as old as college itself.

Martin’s report included only the barest mention of athletics — he did interview people in the athletics academic support program, but the report offered only three paragraphs on the program, describing its mission. When answering trustees’ questions, Martin said, “I’d say there were no coaches that knew anything about this.” He added that there was “absolutely no evidence” that anybody in athletics pushed athletes toward AFAM courses.

One trustee asked about Mary Willingham, who had been quoted in The News & Observer of Raleigh about her time as a reading specialist at UNC. Willingham told the paper she had worked with athletes who couldn’t read and didn’t know what a paragraph was. She said she had complained about athletes remaining eligible to play despite not doing their academic work. Willingham was among those interviewed; in his reply, Martin began talking about learning disabilities. “You cannot discriminate against people with learning disabilities,” he said. Raina Rose Tagle of Baker Tilly added that only a small number of athletes fit into Willingham’s description of “can’t read.”

Nyang’oro’s name surfaced in connection with three different aspects of the investigation into the original NCAA investigation into rules violations in the UNC football program. He missed an incident of plagiarism in a football player’s class work, he was found to have hired a sports agent to teach some classes, and a player was found to have been enrolled in a 400-level course with him before his first full semester at UNC. Martin said that if not for the plagiarism by football player Michael McAdoo ’12 — which was turned up apparently by people associated with N.C. State University who were scouring  websites — the fraud might never have broken into the open.

Evidence of fraud subsequently uncovered involved more than 50 classes, many of which had been taught in summer sessions by Nyang’oro. The initial in-house investigation covered the period of the summer of 2007 through summer 2011. In the period summer 2007 to summer 2009, nine classes containing 59 students were found to be “aberrant” — showing “no evidence that the faculty member listed as instructor of record or any other faculty member actually supervised the course and graded the work, although grade rolls were signed and submitted.”

Forty-three other courses were either aberrant or were “taught irregularly” — in other words, “the instructor provided an assignment and evidently graded the resultant paper but engaged in limited or no classroom or other instructional contact with the student.”

There was some talk in the meeting about how well UNC was implementing changes. Though that was not part of the investigators’ charge, they said that generally, automated systems put in place recently would reduce the possibility such fraud could go undetected again. “You’re doing what you can do … you’ve made great strides,” said Tagle of Baker Tilly.

Prior to Martin’s address to the board, Chancellor Holden Thorp ’86 said in part, “I approach this day with a mix of sadness, anger and hope. Sadness because of the toll that this has taken on the University and the people who love it. Anger because of the irresponsible actions of two people. And hope because this is an important milestone.

“For years, we’ve been proud — and you might even say boastful — that we always did things the right way. We took that for granted. Today, we can’t run away from what we’ve learned.

“We made mistakes in the past. We were complacent. We didn’t ask the hard questions that we should have asked. And we didn’t live up to our reputation.

“We have to acknowledge that we had an environment in which we placed too much trust in people and not enough emphasis on having the systems in place that would have caught these issues. We still need a system of trust, but we also need appropriate accountability. … We can’t be the world-class university that we are and the economic driver for the state that we are if there are any questions about our integrity.”

More online…

Share via: