The Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina—part of the UNC system of 16 colleges and a high school—has been wallowing in a quagmire of embarrassing revelations since 2011: phantom courses, slide classes for money-ball athletes, NCAA sanctions, illegal payments to athletes, and law suits.

The inability to manage the cascade of revelations is exacerbated by a byzantine organizational chart. The chancellor of each school reports to the president of the UNC system as a whole, rather than to his or her own board of trustees. From the UNC system handbook: “The Chancellor reports to the UNC President and is responsible for carrying out the policies of the Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors.”

Confused? Don’t be concerned, so are most people who attempt to clarify the difference in authority between the over-arching UNC Board of Governors and the boards of trustees of member schools. As UNC’s former chancellor Holden Thorp, who was in office in the beginning of the scandals, stated in an interview with me: “North Carolina is the only state with campus boards and a system board. Some states are ‘all-system,’ like California, while others allow their campuses to be run independently by boards of trustees, like Ohio. Gordon Gee at Ohio State [now president of West Virginia University] reports only to a campus board, for example” (go here to read the interview with Thorp about UNC’s current problems).

The UNC-CH chancellor was flung into a multi-dimensional chaotic dilemma when the NCAA came calling in 2011. While he was careful to inform the Board of Trustees, the fact that he reported to the system president automatically catapulted UNC’s problems into a politically charged media melée. From then on the public could not decipher who was calling the shots, university governors or campus trustees. For example, you cannot nail down whether or not the $3.1 million spent on the Wainstein Report, established to root out all the problems at UNC-CH, was ordered and paid for by the system’s governors or the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.

Even more confusing, while the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is only one campus among many, it is first among equals. The name of the university is the same as that of the system. The president of the system lives in a home literally on the UNC-CH campus, while the chancellor’s residence is located farther from the campus than the administrative headquarters of the UNC system.

To this confusion add resentment by the 16 other campuses, which goes back to the days when only three colleges were members of the system (the present-day arrangement was created in 1971). While it is true that the system’s Board of Governors outranks UNC-CH and its board of trustees, the leaders of UNC-CH—the oldest public university in the U. S., and the flagship university in the system—have enjoyed more influence over the Board of Governors and its president than any other member school.

Over the years, UNC-CH has used its clout with the North Carolina legislature to vote down requests by fellow member schools. One particularly acrimonious struggle involved East Carolina University, which desired to create its own medical school in the 1960s. The Chapel Hill mandarins lobbied against East Carolina’s bid in order to protect its own school of medicine, the only one in the system at the time. East Carolina prevailed, but the memory of the skirmish with UNC-CH lingers in the memories of all the system schools.

Also grating to other member schools is the location of the system in Chapel Hill. Although its headquarters were purposefully placed on the “Raleigh Road” toward the capital city (home of NC State University, the contender in size and status to UNC-CH), Raleigh is also the home of the state legislature, which funds a large share of each UNC system school’s operating funds. There has been talk about moving the system headquarters to Raleigh, away from UNC-CH influence, or to neutral ground on the campus of Research Triangle Park near Raleigh and Chapel Hill.

Put another way, the family of 17 campuses has seen its big brother get in serious trouble, thus losing its long-term prestige and respect and, due to the confusion of names, staining the system for sins committed by Chapel Hill. Adding insult to the other member schools, the UNC system is going all out to save UNC-CH’s reputation—an act member schools doubt would happen if they, rather than the golden child UNC-CH, were in big trouble.

Adding to the imbroglio, the legislature—which appoints the UNC Board of Governors—is now Republican, as is the Board of Governors. The BOG’s first major act was to fire the system president—while not actually doing it, allowing him to finish out his contract before he is permanently replaced.

The search is on for a wunderkind new system president, but the hopeless management structure is not changing.