The prosecutor leading an investigation into fraud in an academic department at North Carolina says a retired administrator tied to the case won’t face charges.
In a news release Tuesday, Orange County district attorney Jim Woodall said Deborah Crowder from the formerly named African and Afro-American Studies department is cooperating with investigators. She also will cooperate with an independent investigation by former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth L. Wainstein, announced by the school last month.
The problems in the department included classes with significant athlete enrollments that didn’t meet and were treated as independent study work requiring only a research paper, as well as unauthorized grade changes dating to the late 1990s.
Two school investigations blamed Crowder and ex-chairman Julius Nyang’oro. Nyang’oro was charged in December for receiving $12,000 to teach a summer 2011 lecture course filled with football players and instead treating it as an independent study requiring a paper.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Woodall said he didn’t expect anyone else to be charged.
“You can never say never, understand that, because of course information can come up that I’m unaware of,” Woodall said. “But at this point, I don’t anticipate anybody else being charged.”
The school had said Wainstein would look into any additional information that might become available through the criminal probe conducted by the State Bureau of Investigation. The school said Wainstein would then “take any further steps necessary to address questions left unanswered” in previous reviews about how irregularities took place.
