North Carolina Central University, which is part of the University of North Carolina system, operated a small satellite campus in classrooms in a church in a suburb of Atlanta for four years without authorization from the system’s governing board, Raleigh’s News & Observer newspaper reported.

Twenty-five students earned undergraduate degrees from North Carolina Central through the program before it was shut down this summer, after the university’s accreditor raised concerns, the newspaper reported. About 50 students were still enrolled in the program, and the university has not decided how to handle their academic status.

Erskine B. Bowles, president of the university system, told the newspaper that he could think of “no justifiable reason” why former leaders of N.C. Central, in Durham, would have created the program without approval. He added that he was working with the Durham campus’s current chancellor, Charlie Nelms, and other leaders “to examine the various academic, legal, and financial questions associated with this Georgia-based program.”

The campus was housed at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., whose pastor, Bishop Eddie L. Long, is a graduate of N.C. Central and a member of its Board of Trustees. The church is one of six “media-based ministries” that received letters from U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, last year requesting information about their finances and compensation practices. —Charles Huckabee