On the football field, Julius Peppers was one of the most dominating players to ever wear a UNC uniform, an athlete dubbed a “freak of nature” so skilled that he helped take the university’s men’s basketball team to the Final Four in 2000.
But in the classroom, Peppers was a marginal student with a grade point average so low he was continually at risk of losing the opportunity to play, according to an academic transcript bearing his name. What kept bailing him out were several classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, a relatively young academic unit led by department chair Julius Nyang’oro.
A transcript bearing Peppers’ name, found over the weekend in an odd portal on a UNC website, shows a subpar academic record: a 1.82 grade point average and 11 grades of D or F. It also suggests that the academic fraud already confirmed by the university in the African studies department goes much further back than it had previously been able to confirm.
Peppers’ transcript, and a second one that practically mirrors it, show he received grades of B or better in seven classes within the department, offerings found in later years to be academically suspect. Without those grades, it’s unlikely Peppers would have kept his GPA high enough to play sports. UNC records show Nyang’oro taught or supervised at least three of those classes.
Willis Brooks, a professor emeritus of history at UNC who once sat on its faculty athletics committee, called the transcript evidence of an academic path with the sole intent of keeping an athlete eligible to compete. But he pointed the finger at those in the university who helped make it happen.
