Signs are building that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is going to get away with 18 years of allowing one of its academic departments to conduct academic fraud.

From 1993 to 2011, courses in the African and Afro-American Studies Department of UNC-Chapel Hill allowed weak students, about half of whom were athletes, to boost their grades by taking what an investigator called a “shadow curriculum.” These were courses that held no classes, had no professor, and required only an easily-graded paper.

The latest news is that UNC-Chapel Hill has replied to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s notice of allegations by saying that the NCAA has no jurisdiction over academic matters, since the classes were offered to all students. (The Raleigh News & Observer offers an excellent discussion of the school’s response, which includes what seems to be throwing one professor under the bus.)

The UNC response concedes there were “serious institutional issues” as a result of the no-show classes but they should be dealt with by the school’s accreditor, not the NCAA.

And the school’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) has already released UNC-Chapel Hill from a year-long period of probation, which hardly anyone paid attention to, anyway. SACS was persuaded that the university has procedures in place to stop that particular kind of fraud.

So if UNC-Chapel Hill can convince the NCAA that it lacks jurisdiction over academic matters – and thus it can’t punish the school — everything will go back to normal and the school will have escaped any punishment at all.