David N. Camaione: UNC needs to right the wrong

Regarding Luke DeCock’s May 21 Sports column “Auburn scandal foretold UNC mess”: I agree 100 percent with DeCock’s central thesis, that the NCAA has no business being involved with the academic scandal at UNC. When the chancellor of the university defined this type of academic behavior as fraud, then that is what it is.

The faculty, the brain trust of the university, are the creators of courses and programs. They are the primary source of how, when and why a course is created or deleted. When a professor fails to follow the criteria to dispense academic content in an agreed upon manner and disregards an appropriate evaluation of a student’s progress, he or she has perpetrated a fraud, pure and simple.

UNC needs to audit the academic profile of the student-athletes in those bogus courses. Upon review, if any student-athlete would have been declared academically ineligible once those bogus “good” grades were erased, then the answer is simple: All contests in which they participated are null and void.

Thus, if the two or three men’s basketball players on the 2005 championship basketball team would have been deemed ineligible, the NCAA trophy goes back to Indianapolis. And the university, no one else, would have righted a wrong.

This story was originally published May 25, 2016 at 4:37 PM with the headline "David N. Camaione: UNC needs to right the wrong."