CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Bubba Cunningham could be considered an athletic Utopian, or at least a guy with big ambitions. Cunningham, the first-year athletic director at North Carolina, looks at his department and sees the potential to be the East Coast Stanford.

Stanford is the collegiate gold standard: It has won the Director's Cup as the nation's top overall athletic department 18 consecutive years while maintaining academic excellence.

"They've been able to play top 10 football, win the Director's Cup and have great students who graduate," Cunningham told Yahoo! Sports last week in his spacious office. "We're in the top 10 in the Director's Cup, we're in the top 25 in U.S. News & World Report [rankings of American universities]. I don't think being a good athlete and a being good student is mutually exclusive. Now, I think it's hard – it's hard to do it and to find that select group of students who are willing to do it. But it can be done."

For an athletic director at North Carolina to aspire to such an ideal at a time like this is striking. The athletic program has been dragging the university's reputation through the mud for more than a year now. North Carolina is reeling from a scandal that never seems to end and only seems to get worse.

Put it this way: If anyone has benefitted from the disaster at Penn State, it's North Carolina. This would have been the scandal of the summer if not for the crimes committed in State College, Pa.

In March, the Tar Heels were hit with heavy NCAA sanctions – a bowl ban for the upcoming season, scholarship reductions, vacated victories, three years' probation. That was after academic fraud, impermissible agent interactions and ineligible players already cost coach Butch Davis and athletic director Dick Baddour their jobs.

But it hasn't stopped there. In recent weeks, the News & Observer newspaper of Raleigh, N.C., has reported on other academic shenanigans from as recently as last summer – while UNC was in the middle of its NCAA investigation.

There was the hastily created summer-school course in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies last year that drew an enrollment of 19 students – 18 current football players and one former football player. There was no instruction offered in the class, just a paper to be turned in at term's end to veteran department chairman Julius Nyang'oro.

There were the Afro-American Studies summer classes that were limited to an enrollment of one student – and often that one student was an athlete. There was no attendance or instruction for many of those classes, the News & Observer reported.

All told, there have been 54 Afro-American Studies classes labeled "suspect" by the school's internal investigation. More than half of the students in those classes were athletes. The N&O reported that all but nine of the classes had Nyang'oro listed as the instructor or the signer of the grade rolls.

For a school that holds itself in high academic regard, this is as tawdry as it gets.

"It's demoralizing," said professor of social medicine Sue Estroff, a former UNC faculty chair and 30-year teaching veteran at the school. "It's dumbfounding. It's embarrassing. It's maddening. What else can I say? It's not what anybody wanted. It belongs to all of us, and you can't put it in just one place. It's impossible to defend, nor should we try."

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