Here's the report:
http://advancingrefor.staging.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UNC-FINAL-REPORT.pdf
There's a ton in there. But some highlights:
Between 1993 and 2011, Crowder and Nyang’oro developed and ran a
“shadow curriculum” within the AFAM Department that provided students
with academically flawed instruction through the offering of “paper classes.”
These were classes that involved no interaction with a faculty member,
required no class attendance or course work other than a single paper, and
resulted in consistently high grades that Crowder awarded without reading
the papers or otherwise evaluating their true quality.
A good number of these student-athletes were “steered” to the AFAM paper
classes by certain academic counselors in ASPSA. This steering was most
prevalent among the counselors for the revenue sports of football and men’s
basketball. While some of these counselors knew only that these were easy
classes, others were fully aware that there was no faculty involvement and
that Crowder was managing the whole course and grading the papers. Those
counselors saw these paper classes as “GPA boosters” and steered players
into them largely in order to help them maintain their GPAs and their
eligibility under the NCAA and Chapel Hill eligibility rules. At least two of
those counselors went so far as to suggest what grades Crowder should
award to their players who were taking her paper classes.
ASPSA made tutors available to all student-athletes, and those tutors often
helped the student-athletes with their paper-class papers. While most
conducted themselves appropriately, several of the tutors crossed the line
between permissible and impermissible assistance and drafted parts of the
papers that the student-athletes submitted for credit in these classes.
Like many universities, the Chapel Hill administration took a loose,
decentralized approach to management of its departments and department
chairpersons, on the theory that strong management in the college
environment unduly constrains the academic independence that fosters
creative instruction and research. As a result of this approach, the University
failed to conduct any meaningful oversight of the AFAM Department and
ASPSA, and Crowder’s paper class scheme was allowed to operate within
one of the nation’s premier academic institutions for almost two decades.
We found no evidence that the higher levels of the University tried in any
way to obscure the facts or the magnitude of this situation. To the extent
there were times of delay or equivocation in their response to this
controversy, we largely attribute that to insufficient appreciation of the scale
of the problem, an understandable lack of experience with this sort of
institutional crisis and some lingering disbelief that such misconduct could
have occurred at Chapel Hill.
