Unauthorized campus to cost NCCU

CHAPEL HILL — N.C. Central University will have to repay federal loan money issued to students enrolled over the last four years at an unauthorized satellite campus based at a suburban Atlanta megachurch.

The total tab isn’t yet known, but UNC system President Erskine Bowles said Thursday the university will owe the money because the NCCU program, based at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church from 2004 until this year, had never been approved by the university’s accrediting agency.

Universities can receive and distribute federal financial aid only for programs approved by accrediting agencies.

“We will have a significant liability,” Bowles told members of the audit committee of the UNC system’s Board of Governors. “How much, we do not know at this time. The source of funds and the payment plan, we do not know at this time.”

The Lithonia, Ga.-based church’s pastor is Eddie Long, an NCCU alumnus who has been a trustee there since 2002.

Bowles made clear he was disgusted with NCCU’s prior leadership, under which the New Birth campus was created and operated until earlier this summer. That’s when the program was finally submitted to the accrediting agency — the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges — which then turned it down.

The program ceased operations and NCCU and university system officials scrambled to figure out how it had been created and what to do with students still enrolled.

Bowles said Thursday that after months of work on the issue, he still has no explanation for the program’s origins.

“I still do not know,” he said. “I can think of no justifiable reason whatsoever why the previous leadership at NCCU would completely fail,” to follow proper rules.

The chancellor at the time was James Ammons, now president at Florida A&M University. Ammons said last month he accepted responsibility for the program, but said he didn’t recall the specifics of its creation and assumed it had been properly approved.

Neither the NCCU Board of Trustees nor the UNC system’s governing board were ever formally briefed on the program or given the chance to vote on it.

On Thursday, Bowles said his office’s investigation is continuing and he is keeping the state auditor’s office and law enforcement informed. He did not elaborate.

He did say his office has examined about 400 other off-site degree programs offered by UNC system campuses and turned up just a few small issues.

“We have found nothing remotely comparable,” he said.

The New Birth campus offered undergraduate degrees in criminal justice, business administration and hospitality and tourism, and 25 students graduated. There is still some question whether their degrees have the same value as those of regular NCCU students.

NCCU’s current chancellor, Charlie Nelms, inherited the New Birth issue not long after arriving in Durham last year. His work in dealing with the saga has been a bright spot, Bowles said.

“If it were not for Charlie, I do not know where we would be today,” Bowles said. “He inherited a mess.”