RALEIGH, N.C. ― An accreditation agency important to colleges receiving federal funds put the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on probation Thursday for a year over its academic fraud scandal.
The board of Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges stopped short of imposing the harshest penalty, which would have blocked the country’s oldest public university from receiving federal funds including student loan proceeds.
At a meeting in Portsmouth, Virginia, the group determined that UNC failed to comply with seven key operating principals for member universities ― among them: integrity, program content, control of intercollegiate athletics and academic support services.
The practical effect of the sanction is that “they just have to send us more documentation to show their compliance with seven of these principals,” commission President Belle Wheelan said.
The agency previously opted against punishing UNC but acted after learning last fall of the scope of fake classes and artificially high grades in one academic department. A report revealed that the fake classes in the African studies department had gone on between 1993 and 2011. About half the 3,100 students who took the classes were athletes.
Wheelan said board members stopped short of action that would mean the loss of federal funds in part because campus chancellor Carol Folt, who took over in 2013, and administrators she brought in hadn’t been responsible for the festering problems.
Folt’s team “had done a lot of work to clean up the problem. But there’s still these seven standards that the board felt they had not demonstrated compliance yet,” Wheelan said.
