Forget the sports publications of this scandal. Sorry, but those guys know the x's and o's, but this is out of their area of expertise. The Chronicle of Higher Education, essentially the trade paper for college stuff, has a very damning report on the UNC affair.
Read the whole thing and it's as bad on a who-knew basis (though obviously way short of the crime) as the Jerry Sandusky/Penn State debacle. They knew, all the way to the top. There were people whose job essentially was steering players to these courses and getting them through them...including a secretary grading papers.
A lot of lower level faculty and staff have already been sanctioned in one way or another, some losing their jobs (though some just bouncing to another instituion). But there's no way, for as long as this was going on, that they didn't know about this all the way to the top. That's the sort of thing that everybody knows, the open secret among faculty administrators, the Harvey Weinstein of UNC academics.
I know a senior faculty member of a Div II school and I can tell you that they are extremely sensitive to NCAA violations. If one player on a team isn't carrying a "full load"--12 hours minimum--because, say, they dropped a class--the team will have forfeited all of the games that team played while he/she was not meeting that qualification. Ditto GPA. If you're not making grades, you don't play. Department chairs work with the athletic department on this. (It's not "giving athletes extra help", just making sure the
team meet standards).
The fact that the UNC classes were open to other students was a fig leaf of plausible deniability, and that only. They were created to help athletes pretend to be students. That some frat brothers found out that these were the ultimate of gut courses, good for padding your gpa, they were in, but kept it quiet so that other students didn't kill the goose laying those golden A's.
Were/are there athletes at UNC who were truly student-athletes? Of course. But this is damning not only of the athletic department but the university as a whole. The president of Penn State went to jail for allowing and covering up Jerry Sandusky's crime (and letting JoPa handle the football team and players separate from the rest of Penn State). But the UNC president was culpable as the PSU president, and although again the UNC scandal obviously isn't criminal to the extent PSU was, but they knew it to the top, and they made lower level faculty and staff scapegoats.
Here's the article. Read it an amaze your friends with your knowledge. There's a number of other articles about the scandal in the Chronicle. You know how to find them. But in short,
they knew.