SPORTS

Roy Williams says it’s a ‘sad time’ at North Carolina

Bob Berghaus
bberghaus@citizen-times.com

Shortly after coaching his team to an exhibition win Friday night, North Carolina’s Roy Williams talked about a report released Wednesday outlined how students took sham classes for almost two decades.

It involved more than 3,100 students — about half were athletes — taking classes and earning artificially high grades in African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) classes that didn't exist.

According to research by the Raleigh News & Observer, after the scam started in 1993, former coach Dean Smith’s players had 54 enrollments in four seasons prior to his retirement (average of more than 13 per year).

In three seasons, coach Bill Guthridge had 17 enrollments in paper classes, just over five per year. Matt Doherty had 42 in three seasons.

In Williams’ first eight years his players had 167 enrollments.

Asheville native Rashad McCants, who played on the 2005 national championship team, said last summer interview that Williams was aware of the paper class system and that he would swap a class to keep McCants eligible.

Williams denied telling McCants that he would swap classes for him.

McCants refused to be interviewed for the investigation.

Here is the Associated Press story with Williams’ comments following a 111-58 win over Fayetteville State.

North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams said Friday it’s a “very sad time” at the school after an investigation found widespread academic fraud and adds that his program “thought we were doing the right thing.”

After his team’s exhibition victory Friday night, Williams spoke for the first time in response to a report released Wednesday that outlined how fraud ran unchecked in a department for nearly two decades. It involved more than 3,100 students — about half were athletes — taking sham classes and earning artificially high grades in the formerly named African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department.

Williams said he was “dumbfounded” by the details in the report and said UNC “made some mistakes for a long time” that have damaged the school’s reputation.

“We’ve made a lot of moves,” he said. “A lot of procedures have been put in place, a lot of people have lost their jobs. And I’ll always be sad about the image we have right now around the country. We’ve had one of the greatest images that you can possibly have. We’re going to work as hard as we can possibly work to have that image be back to where it was.”

The report by former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein called the system a “shadow curriculum” running from 1993 to 2011 in AFAM. Much of that centered on an office secretary assigning a research paper and then giving A’s and B’s after a quick scan regardless of the quality with no faculty oversight.

The report stated Williams and other coaches said they were aware there were independent study courses offering easy grades, but they didn’t know the classes were bogus.

Wainstein said he found no reason not to believe them.

“We thought we were doing the right thing, felt very comfortable about it,” Williams said of his program. “Our kids that were in the AFAM, I think our kids tried to do the right thing. The kids tried to do the work that they were assigned.”

The NCAA has reopened an academic-misconduct investigation, though Williams wouldn’t speculate on whether the program would face sanctions.