To provide members of the Faculty Council with an idea of where UNC stands in the ongoing NCAA investigation, Chancellor Holden Thorp held up a page-long flow chart.
“We’re up here,” he said, pointing straight to the top.
At the organization’s monthly meeting Friday, Thorp highlighted the investigation’s complex and lengthy timetable, while faculty members expressed concern with systemic problems within the athletic program.
Thorp said the question on most people’s minds seems to be, “When will we get to the end of this?”
“And that doesn’t have an accurate or simple answer,” he said. “We could decide that no one in question can play and end the suspense about who would be coming back, but that wouldn’t be fair to the students. Or we can just take chances and play people, and that wouldn’t be consistent with the University and our ideals.”
“So we’re stuck in the middle, doing what’s right,” he added.
The focus of the meeting was then brought to the recent accusations of illegal contact between former associate head football coach John Blake and agent Gary Wichard — and whether the policy prohibiting interaction between student athletes and agents extends to the coaching staff.
“We clearly have an academic policy that prevents people from cheating on paper,” said history professor Lloyd Kramer. “But do we have in place any policy that will regulate contact between our coaches and agents where money and contact like this is involved?”
Thorp said a judicial organization set up to deal with these issues does not exist, adding that the NCAA regulations are the extent to which this relationship is monitored.
