After an eight-month probe headed by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill released a report on Wednesday revealing nearly two decades of academic fraud involving thousands of its students, many of whom were college athletes.
Leading the investigation was Kenneth Wainstein, a former U.S. Department of Justice official and chair of the white-collar defense and investigations practice at Cadwalader. Wainstein was brought on board by UNC president Tom Ross and UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Carol Folt in February to get to the bottom of the long-running academic scandal, which centered on the so-called paper classes—fake classes managed by a nonfaculty administrator, Deborah Crowder—in the African and Afro-American Studies department (AFAM).
