UNC report shocks NCAA boss

Staff report

INDIANAPOLIS

NCAA President Mark Emmert said Monday that findings from a recent investigation into academic fraud at the University of North Carolina are troubling, disturbing and shocking.

While Emmert said he would withhold final judgment until the NCAA completes its own investigation, the usually cautious former university president was downright blunt during a 20-minute interview with The Associated Press at its Indianapolis headquarters.

“Just based on the [Kenneth] Wainstein report, this is a case that potentially strikes at the heart of what higher education is about,” Emmert said Monday. “Universities are supposed to take absolutely most seriously the education of their students, right?

“I mean that’s why they exist, that’s their function in life. If the Wainstein report is accurate, then there was severe, severe compromising of all those issues, so it’s deeply troubling. ... It’s absolutely disturbing that we find ourselves here right now.”

North Carolina athletic department spokesman Steve Kirschner said the school would not comment on Emmert’s remarks.

The report, authored by a former Justice Department official who conducted an internal investigation into the NCAA’s own enforcement department scandal in 2013, was released last week. It detailed how academic fraud in the formerly named African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department went on for nearly two decades.

According to Wainstein, the “shadow curriculum” involved more than involved more than 3,100 students — about half of whom were athletes.

The NCAA has been on the defensive as well.

In August, former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon won a federal court case that could force schools to put as much as $5,000 per year into a trust fund that college athletes could collect after they leave school.