For former North Carolina defensive end Michael McAdoo, the student judicial system has taken on a whole new level of importance.
McAdoo filed a lawsuit Friday against Chancellor Holden Thorp, the University and the NCAA in an attempt to regain his eligibility to play football at UNC.
Noah Huffstetler, McAdoo’s lawyer, said the suit is based on the Instrument of Student Judicial Governance. In a letter to the NCAA on June 3, Huffstetler wrote that the University Honor Court is “the only body authorized to determine facts and access culpability in Mr. McAdoo’s case,” according to the Instrument.
In October, McAdoo was tried before the Honor Court on academic charges relating to two classes he took during his freshman year — from fall 2008 through summer 2009.
The court found McAdoo to be guilty of submitting a former tutor’s work on a works cited page as his own in a Swahili class in July 2009, and recommended that he be eligible to play football again beginning in fall 2011. The court found McAdoo to be not guilty on all other charges.
The NCAA, however, ruled in November that McAdoo received “impermissible assistance on multiple assignments across several academic terms.” In an email to Thorp, NCAA President Mark Emmert said, “the fact that (UNC’s) honor committee found him guilty of misconduct was apparently a very important factor,” in the NCAA’s decision to declare McAdoo permanently ineligible.
Huffstetler said that this ruling was “capricious and arbitrary,” and that by making this decision the NCAA had failed to consider important information and had also violated its own procedure by holding a reinstatement hearing in December before all of the facts had been verified.
Huffstetler said the key issue to the case is the Instrument’s nature as a contract between the University and its students. “The Instrument is an agreement between students and UNC… and should be enforceable against UNC as well as students,” he said.
McAdoo’s lawyers also claim that the NCAA’s decision violated its own bylaws. According to the bylaws, a student athlete must know that the academic assistance they are receiving is improper.
