SECOND OF FOUR PARTS

Questions about Julius Peppers’ transcript, but UNC leaders resist knowing all

 

UNC system President Tom Ross was irked by The N&O’s story about the unidentified transcript, telling a board of governors member it contained nothing new. The discovery the next day that it was Peppers’ transcript showed otherwise.

BY DAN KANE

dkane@newsobserver.com

By the time Peter Hans took over the chairmanship of the UNC Board of Governors in the summer of 2012, he was known as a problem solver, with 15 years of experience in government, higher education and public relations. He worked for a major law firm as a senior policy adviser and had previously worked for three prominent Republicans in Congress.

His profession taught him to choose his words carefully. When he saw a story on Julius Peppers’ transcript that August, he didn’t get defensive about his alma mater. He wanted to know more.

 

An enterprising fan of N.C. State had found the transcript – not a public document – on a UNC website. It came a day after The News & Observer had published another version of the transcript that didn’t have Peppers’ name; it had been put on the website years earlier as UNC tested a tool to track students’ progress toward graduation.

Peppers was one of UNC’s most popular and best-known athletes, a two-sport star who had made a fortune in the NFL. But his transcript revealed a weak academic record: 11 Ds and Fs and a 1.82 GPA, with most of his decent grades in the no-show classes that were starting to cause trouble.

UNC system President Tom Ross was irked by the story about the unidentified transcript, telling a former board of governors member it contained nothing new. That’s what a university official had told him.

It was a pattern that would be repeated during five years of revelations about a scheme of bogus classes that helped keep athletes eligible at UNC, the nation’s oldest public university, which took great pride in doing things the right way, “The Carolina Way.”

Newly released records show many key officials refused to believe that such a scandal could have endured in Chapel Hill – and reveal their consistent efforts to downplay the importance of many of the revelations that emerged.

“I don’t think the article changes anything,” Ross wrote to Brent Barringer, a former board of governors member. “...The University needs to be focused on fixing the problem. I don’t think they learn anything by going back in time.

“They don’t deny it was going on for a long time, but there is no evidence anyone else was involved beyond the two people already identified.”

The discovery the next day that it was Peppers’ transcript, also published in the newspaper, added more pressure. Hans wanted to know whether the revelation would move campus officials to action.

“Tom,” Hans wrote in an email to Ross, “will you please let me know of the campus’ reaction to The N&O’s Julius Peppers story?”

That story drew a blast of national media. Peppers had survived four years at UNC by taking several of Deborah Crowder’s paper classes. His transcript, which included classes from 1998 to 2001, not only showed the scandal went back much further than UNC was willing to investigate but that the classes had protected a top athlete’s eligibility.

Ross sent Hans’ question to UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp. “How would you like me to answer this?” Ross asked.

UNC officials complained about Peppers’ transcript becoming public. They said it violated student privacy rights as laid out in a federal law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. They said nothing about what the transcript exposed.

A limited investigation

Wade Hargrove, the board of trustees’ chairman, realized when Peppers’ transcript emerged that his plan for a review of the university’s academic policies and controls wasn’t going to be enough. The university had to bring in someone to dig deeper.

Thorp suggested former Gov. Jim Martin, who served two terms from 1985 to 1993. Martin was highly respected, a retired chemistry professor from Davidson College – where Ross was later president – and a Republican, which would satisfy lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature. Martin was friendly with Thorp from their service on a board that helped businesses find defense work.

Martin would be aided by Baker Tilly, the Chicago-based accounting and management consulting firm that Hargrove and his colleagues had recently selected to review academic controls.

Thorp had the probe lined up in four days. His August announcement drew immediate praise from key critics such as Jay Smith, an outspoken UNC history professor, and Burley Mitchell, former chief justice of the state Supreme Court and a member of the university system’s board of governors.

Martin had no experience as an investigator. He was an avid sports fan and critical of higher education, which he believed had sacrificed educational quality and was too firmly controlled by left-leaning leaders.

Baker Tilly, meanwhile, hadn’t been asked to assign people with investigative experience to the job. Thorp added the investigation to the same group performing the original task of assessing academic controls.

The investigation would be done before the end of the year.

Chancellor triggers alarms

Thorp had other problems. The youthful chancellor, a chemistry whiz who had risen quickly to the university’s top spot at age 43, had entered the office with a genuine belief in “The Carolina Way.”

He was a UNC grad who would later say that he had been too trusting of those around him and too slow to get to the bottom of the problems within the African studies department. One month into Martin’s investigation, in September 2012, Thorp announced his resignation.

A relationship involving UNC’s top fundraiser, Matt Kupec, a former star quarterback for the university, and Tami Hansbrough, the mother of a popular UNC basketball player, Tyler Hansbrough, was the final straw in two years of athletic-related scandals. Kupec and Hansbrough had traveled together on trips at university expense that had little to do with university business, and Thorp had approved Hansbrough’s job and traveled with the couple several times.

Thorp pledged to stay until the end of the academic year. He saw it as an opportunity to right the ship for his successor.

But one of his first moves showed how little some at the university wanted to tackle the pressure that big-money sports places on academics. During a visit in late September to The N&O, Thorp announced that UNC would be coming forward with tougher standards on academics for athletes that he predicted would be “national news.”

“Academics are going to have to come first,” Thorp said in an interview that was taped by The N&O. “And it’s clear that they haven’t to the extent that they should.”

Trustee Alston Gardner soon received an email from an angry UNC alum, who wrote: “UNC will soon be mediocre on the playing field in sports like men’s basketball and football, if Thorp is allowed to implement his crazy plan.”

Gardner, a venture capitalist, Durham native and avid supporter of UNC athletics, forwarded the email to another trustee, Lowry Caudill.

“Is this a) another self-inflicted wound or b) did the N&O misquote or misconstrue Holden’s remarks?” Gardner asked Caudill. “If it’s A, then Holden should terminate all contact with the N&O. If it’s B, the(n) we should release the transcripts of the interview on our website. Additionally, all meetings with the N&O should be videotaped and have multiple participants.”

Caudill is the co-founder of Magellan Laboratories and a chemistry instructor who has long been on the executive board of the Rams Club, the powerful fundraising arm of UNC athletics.

The Rams Club runs two foundations that help pay for scholarships, facilities and other athletic needs. It had $265 million in assets in 2014, according to its most recently available tax return, to help an athletic department whose annual spending has grown from $46 million in 2004 to $83 million a decade later.

Caudill, a resident of Durham, was serving on the Rams Club’s executive committee. He said in an email to Gardner that Thorp told him his words were “twisted.”

“But we both know words can sometimes be interpreted differently,” Caudill wrote. “Not trying to give N&O a break.”

A review of an audio recording from Thorp’s visit shows the story was accurate. He had been prepped for the visit by Doug Sosnik, a public relations expert on a $15,000-a-month contract.

Caudill later wrote to Gardner: “HT created a firestorm with his N&O interview last week.” He followed up: “What we are asked to do is very important. Glad you and I are doing this one. We have a chance to weave academics and athletics and set the stage for years ahead.”

 

Three weeks after Thorp’s comments, men’s basketball coach Roy Williams brought an end to Thorp’s talk about UNC leading the way with tougher academic standards.

“I’m not so sure that everything that appeared is exactly what Chancellor Thorp meant,” Williams told reporters at the ACC’s annual basketball media day. “I personally don’t think that anybody in the ACC is going to try to do any of those new measures before everybody else does them.”

The university adopted no new standards that measured up to what Thorp had promised.

Time to ‘move forward’

As Martin’s group continued its work, The N&O reported in late September 2012 about roughly 100 pages of correspondence it had obtained involving the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes.

 

The records showed that counselors knew the classes didn’t meet despite being advertised as lecture-style. They also knew that the classes required only a paper and that the grade would be high.

The counselors were placing academically weak freshman football players in the classes.

The records would become important documents two years later in Kenneth Wainstein’s probe. But UNC’s email message to trustees, system officials and the board of governors conveyed irritation about student education records that had again been made public.

The N&O provided copies of the correspondence to UNC, which then sent the records to Martin. An email shows Vince Ille, a UNC associate athletic director, contacted a former tutor who was identified in the story.

Ille had been hired two months earlier from the University of Illinois, part of the team led by new athletic director Bubba Cunningham.

Ille’s job was NCAA compliance. But that wasn’t his focus in his email to the tutor, Whitney Read, who had declined to be interviewed for The N&O’s story. Ille wanted to know how The N&O obtained the student records. He said they were “illegally provided to The News & Observer in violation of federal law.”

Ille says compliance officials at UNC examined the records and conducted an appropriate review. Martin’s report two months later made no mention of Read or of the academic support correspondence. In fact, Martin found no connection to athletics at all.

In his report in late December 2012, he blamed the African studies scandal on a misguided department manager – Deborah Crowder – who he said wanted to help all students, and a department chairman – Julius Nyang’oro – who Martin theorized wanted to build up his class enrollment numbers. Martin said athletic officials not only didn’t try to hide the classes, they pointed them out in 2002 and 2006 to a faculty athletic committee, which told the athletic officials the way professors taught classes was none of their business.

He then blamed the “phantom” classes on grade inflation, a concern he’d had about higher education for many years. He confirmed evidence that the classes went back at least into the 1990s, and identified roughly 200 that were fake or suspicious.

Martin’s report satisfied UNC and UNC system officials, as well as many trustees and members of the board of governors. They called it thorough and objective. They said it was time to “move forward.”

But soon, they would have to look back again.

This story was originally published September 18, 2016 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Questions about Julius Peppers’ transcript, but UNC leaders resist knowing all."