The University of North Carolina has been slapped with a year’s probation by its accreditation agency for one of the worst cases of academic fraud in U.S. history. The fraud continued over an 18-year-period.

The board of Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges stopped short of imposing the harshest penalty, which would have blocked the country’s oldest public university from receiving federal funds, including student loan proceeds.

Kansas University has many ties to UNC through its chancellor, Bernadette Gray-Little, and her husband, Shade Keys Little, who worked at UNC prior to coming to KU, and through athletics — former KU basketball coach Roy Williams and his student academic adviser, Wayne Walden.

The Journal-World reported Sunday that although Gray-Little, who held top positions at UNC, has maintained she was unaware of the fake classes, her husband, Shade Little, held positions as assistant and interim associate dean of Academic Services, the department charged with tutoring and advising students and athletes at UNC, and worked closely with people in the thick of the scandal.

Belle Wheelan, president of the accreditation commission, told the Journal-World on Thursday that UNC at Chapel Hill had violated seven operating principles, including academic support services, integrity, control of intercollegiate athletics, core requirements and academic freedom.

A letter from the commission to UNC explaining the precise violations is not yet public.

Kansas University Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little and her husband, Shade Little, attend a KU basketball game on Jan. 2, 2011, at Allen Fieldhouse. The couple worked at the University of North Carolina before coming to KU in 2009.

The practical effect of the probation is that “they just have to send us more documentation to show their compliance with seven of these principles,” Wheelan said.

The agency previously opted against punishing UNC but acted after learning last fall of the scope of fake classes and artificially high grades in one academic department. An extensive report by Kenneth Wainstein, a former FBI general counsel, revealed that the fake classes in the African studies department had gone on between 1993 and 2011. About half the 3,100 students who took the classes were athletes.

Neither Bernadette Gray-Little nor Shade Little, who came to KU in 2009, would comment for this story and were not questioned by Wainstein. UNC basketball coach Williams told Wainstein he did not know about the fraudulent classes. Wainstein’s report said Walden, who followed Williams to UNC from KU as an academic adviser, steered athletes to the paper classes. Walden could not be reached for comment Thursday.

“Paper classes” refer to classes that did not meet academic standards and often required little or no work on the part of students and no class attendance or meetings with faculty.

UNC documents show that Bernadette Gray-Little, a psychology professor, held top administrative positions from 1999 until 2009. Those positions included executive vice chancellor and provost and dean of the college of arts and sciences.

Shade Little was one of 14 staff members listed in the August 2007 Tutor Handbook for the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes. Of those 14 staff members, 10 were named in the Wainstein report and several have been fired or disciplined.

Whistleblower Mary Willingham, who was a colleague of Shade Little’s in the academic support program, said the paper classes were well-known and were discussed specifically in the academic support program staff meetings.

“He knew, I knew, we all knew,” Willingham told the Journal-World in Sunday’s story.

But for a previous Journal-World story, Gray-Little said: “I’ve read of the painful revelations about the academic experiences of some student-athletes at Carolina over the past several years. If I’d known of the problems in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies that have since come to light I would have taken action to address them.”

On Thursday, Wheelan said board members stopped short of action that would mean the loss of federal funds, in part because UNC Chancellor Carol Folt, who took over in 2013, and administrators she brought in hadn’t been responsible for the festering problems.

Folt’s team “had done a lot of work to clean up the problem. But there’s still these seven standards that the board felt they had not demonstrated compliance yet,” Wheelan said in an Associated Press story.

Folt said also in that story that she never worried the university might lose accreditation or federal funds.

“I did not think that would be a fair resolution,” Folt said. “They’re asking us to show continued progress on all the reforms that were put in place. So we presented two years of data on a number of things and they want to see a third year, and I understand that.”

The Wainstein report in October found lecture classes that didn’t meet and were treated as an independent study requiring a research paper or two. Wainstein’s report also detailed how academic counselors enrolled athletes in those classes and how poor oversight throughout the university allowed the fraud to run unchecked for so long.

Wainstein was able to interview Julius Nyang’oro, former chairman of UNC’s African-American studies program, and retired program administrator Deborah Crowder, who the report said orchestrated the paper classes. Neither had cooperated with earlier investigations but spoke to Wainstein after a state prosecutor agreed not to press charges.

The academic investigation grew out of a 2010 investigation into the school’s football program.

The country’s main college sports sanctioning body, the NCAA, last month accused UNC of failing to control its intercollegiate athletics program and for four other severe violations.

UNC has reviewed the allegations by the NCAA, but the NCAA has not yet issued sanctions.

KU Athletic Director Sheahon Zenger declined to comment for this story.

Nationwide, regional accrediting agencies placed 21 schools on academic probation and withdrew accreditation for 17 others around the country in 2014 and the first three months of this year, according to figures compiled by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

— The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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