University of North Carolina placed on probation by accreditation agency
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges has placed the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a year-long probationary period — the harshest sanction before revocation of accreditation.
The ruling was announced at a commission board meeting Thursday and follows the May 20, 2015 receipt of allegations filed by the NCAA. According to the News & Observer, the decision was a culmination of recurring meetings during the accrediting agency’s summer conference.
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Officials reviewed a report compiled by commission staff in addition to a second report generated by UNC and found that UNC violated seven standards, including control on athletics, faculty governance and academic integrity, as reported by the News & Observer.
The secondary review was precipitated by the October 22, 2014 release of the Wainstein Report, which revealed extensive academic fraud and detailed the workings of the “paper classes” scheme, a covert operation under which 3,100 students — nearly half of whom were student-athletes — took classes without faculty involvement, attendance requirements or legitimate coursework obligations.
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Following the investigation's findings, Chancellor Folt said that the scandal reflected "deep, institutional oversight" and that 70 initiatives had been implemented to facilitate academic and athletic reform.
In a message issued to the Carolina community, Folt said the commission acknowledged the university's strides and was subjecting the school to probation to monitor its progress.
"The University has worked very hard and in complete good faith to provide the Commission with an expansive range of information to demonstrate our compliance with the Commission’s principles, standards and requirements," she said. "We have the utmost confidence in our present compliance and in the effectiveness of the many reforms implemented in recent years and will embrace the opportunity during the one-year period of probation to prove that even further. We owe that to the University’s rich and revered history, to our current students, faculty and staff and indeed to the entire Carolina community."
Jaleesa Jones is a summer 2015 USA TODAY College intern and a recent alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.