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The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced Thursday that it had imposed a one-year probation on East Carolina University but instituted no limitations on recruiting, scholarships or postseason competition for a major case of academic fraud in its athletics program. Unethical conduct in the form of academic fraud is among the most serious of NCAA violations, and instances of it have been on the rise. In East Carolina's case, a female tennis player who worked as a tutor for the athletics department wrote a total of 15 papers for four baseball players in the fall of 2009, and then two of the athletes lied to investigators about the violations.
Yet the NCAA's Division I Committee on Infractions, saying that individual students were entirely responsible for the violations and that East Carolina had "acted appropriately at all phases before and during the investigation," required only that the institution vacate victories in which the guilty athletes had participated. Not only did the university investigate the allegations aggressively, but it altered several policies and practices to avoid future breaches, the NCAA said. Two of the baseball players were declared ineligible through the 2010-11 season; the other two, and the women’s tennis player, were ruled permanently ineligible and removed from their respective teams. The case was adjudicated through the NCAA's summary disposition process, which is used when there is no dispute between the association and an institution over a case.
