CHARLOTTE, N.C. – 3,100 students, about 48 percent of them student athletes, steered into fake classes at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In many instances, to keep the athletes eligible. It happened for nearly two decades. University Chancellor Carol Folt stepped into the role last year. She was in Charlotte for an alumni event and met with WCCB News @ Ten anchor Morgan Fogarty beforehand. She asked Folt, “How does UNC plan to remedy the fact that so many students graduated with these false credits on their transcripts?” Folt replied, “What we did is offer students an opportunity to take more courses. A number of students did. Not as many as you might think about it, in part because it’s hard for students who’ve graduated, believing that they did the work, to come back to campus. We are looking into things, I haven’t figured them all out yet, but we may try to give them an opportunity to take some high quality online courses.”
The Get: UNC Chancellor Carol Folt
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At least nine university employees have been fired or are under disciplinary review. Fogarty: “What responsibility do the students who took the paper classes, the fake classes, do they bear in this situation?” Folt, “It’s very hard for us to tell exactly what any student knew, and I think even that was pretty clear in the Wainstein Report, where he had the opportunity to really talk to people. I think there are a number of students, in fact, it could be a fairly high number of students, who thought they were really taking a class where they did an independent study. Folt continued, “For students who don’t know and especially those that are told ‘this is what to do in this class,’ they think a professor is doing it, I’m not sure they really understand the difference, so I think it’s hard to assess culpability in that way. I tend to think that it’s really the institution that failed them.”Β
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Fogarty asked, “Are you prepared for the NCAA possibly handing down this so-called, fabled “death penalty?” Folt replied, “I’m not gonna guess what the NCAA is going to do. I do feel very proud of the extent of which we’ve been working with the NCAA. In the same way I feel proud of the way we’ve been working with our accrediting agency. Pre-dating me, when it was first discovered by the previous chancellor, they immediately went to the NCAA. So I believe in the process, and I think we’re gonna continue to hold ourselves to those standards and we will deal with the situation as it arises.”Β
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Folt has this message for the Charlotte area’s 18,000 UNC alum: “This is not what defines the institution. It’s an important chapter and we accept it without excuses, and we’re gonna use it to make sure we come through stronger, but this does not define us.”
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Fogarty also asked Chancellor Folt why non-student athletes were steered into the fake classes, if she is worried about her reputation, like Coach Roy Williams said he is, and what she thinks her legacy at the university will be. Click here for that bonus footage.
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For more information on how UNC is moving forward from the academic fraud scandal, visit: http://carolinacommitment.unc.edu/
