It seemed like an open-and-shut case. A few years ago, several football players at Kansas State University told investigators from the National Collegiate Athletic Association that they had accepted impermissible help from tutors.
An admission of guilt by the players, and allegations that staff members were involved, would normally allow an investigation to proceed. But there were questions about how much help the players had actually received.
The university’s lawyers requested a rules interpretation from the association, according to two former NCAA investigators who worked on the case. The interpretation, which came from the association’s academic-and-membership-affairs staff, surprised the investigators: While the players’ actions appeared to cross the line, they didn’t rise to the level of an NCAA violation. (The NCAA would not comment on the case, and Kansas State did not respond to messages.)
Critics say the NCAA’s rule book has often hindered its pursuit of academic fraud, in part because colleges have all the power to determine whether misconduct occurred. While almost everyone agrees that the institutions, and not the NCAA, should have primary oversight of academic-fraud investigations, some observers say that colleges go soft on themselves when it comes to punishment.
“It’s almost as if they’re looking for any way not to have to find someone guilty of misconduct,” said one outside expert who has been involved in NCAA fraud investigations and spoke on condition of anonymity. “They don’t want to indict the entire academic community.”
But recent scrutiny of academic violations, including high-profile missteps at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has led to frank discussions among athletics leaders about the appropriate punishment for academic fraud.
Next year the NCAA is expected to propose rules aimed at clarifying the kinds of violations that deserve penalties. The proposed changes would introduce a new “lesser offense” charge in addition to the academic-fraud charge already on the books.
The new category, tentatively termed “impermissible academic assistance,” would recognize that athletes can receive levels of improper academic help beyond what is available to other students, but that such help may not amount to flat-out cheating.
Under the proposal, those violations would not necessarily carry the stiffest of penalties, as other NCAA academic-fraud violations do, but would be handled on the basis of the nature of the offense.
Diane Dickman, the NCAA’s managing director of academic and membership affairs, said the proposed changes would recognize a “spectrum” of academic violations, not just severe breaches that sometimes lead to major penalties. (Since 1990 the NCAA has processed 37 cases of academic fraud.)
The changes under consideration, Ms. Dickman said, are a result of NCAA leaders’ desire to ensure that academic fraud is penalized appropriately, and not just certain kinds of fraud, such as that relating to a player’s eligibility.
“If an athlete turned in a paper that a coach helped him write,” she said, “that act is a violation of rules,” whether or not that grade or class affected the student’s academic eligibility. “That’s a big philosophical shift, but one our membership is solidly behind.”
‘We Defer’
But Jonathan Duncan, the association’s head of enforcement, said he didn’t expect wholesale changes in the NCAA’s role in sussing out fraud. “This is not a big departure, not a fork in the road,” he said.
A clarification released this year, spelling out that colleges have the primary responsibility for investigating and determining any potential fraud, is not likely to be changed, Mr. Duncan said.
“What we’re hearing from our membership really clearly is that the institutions are in the best position to decide what is and what isn’t academic fraud on a campus, and the NCAA isn’t going to second-guess those academic-fraud decisions,” he said. “They decide if academic fraud occurred or didn’t. We defer to that finding.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that the NCAA automatically assumes that no other violations occurred. Under the current structure, the association can determine, for example, that athletes received benefits to which other students were not entitled, which is impermissible.
Asked whether he believed that the association should push for more power to penalize academic misconduct, particularly with the heightened interest in the issue, Mr. Duncan said that wasn’t the NCAA’s role.
“I don’t think of it in terms of power,” he said. “We just want to make sure the national office is in a position to satisfy the membership’s expectations that student-athletes get a valid education.”
That said, he admitted to sometimes having been frustrated in cases involving academic impropriety.
“Sometimes we look at facts differently than an institution does, but in the end they’ve made clear that they make those fraud decisions, and we’ve got plenty of work that keeps us busy,” he said. “We don’t feel the need to relitigate things they have determined, even if, based on what little information we have, we would have come out differently.”
Regardless of who is in charge of investigations, or whether they lead to NCAA penalties, colleges must take their oversight seriously, said Gene A. Marsh, a lawyer with the workplace-law firm Jackson Lewis and a former chair of the NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions.
“Schools can’t stand down just because the NCAA does,” he said in an email. “That is just asking for trouble and sends the wrong message on campus if the facts stink.”