Wainstein report continues to impact UNC students

“I feel like this investigation is an attack on my scholarship,” Taylor Webber-Fields said.

Webber-Fields was among a group of students in UNC’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies who discussed their reaction to the report during an open forum Thursday night.

The event was in response to the recently released report, which detailed academic fraud within the department for decades.

Some of the department’s current students said they're looked at differently on campus and believe the value of their degree is being questioned.

“I feel there are racial undertones that have not been addressed,” Webber-Fields said.

Student athletes say they're also under the microscope.

“Whoever it was that did this is not here anymore,” said Jarrod Jones, a student coach for the football team. “We are a group going under a lot of stress right now.”

The stress, Jones said, has made student athletes worried about every move they make.

"Heightened alert on what we would post on social media, who was following us, what did we say,” he said. “So for a while, guys felt as if they could not be themselves."

But Jones said the report is like pulling off an adhesive bandage, and that the hardest pain is behind them.

"Your Carolina degree is as strong and powerful now as it was the day before the Wainstein report, and if we act with courage and conviction, it will be stronger as you go forward," Carol Folt, UNC chancellor, said at the event.