H

earing reports that over the past 18 years more than 3,000 students, many of them athletes, took fake classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, you can’t help but think of Capt. Louis Renault’s indignation in a famous scene from Casablanca.

Capt. Renault: “I’m shocked — shocked — to find gambling is going on in here!”

Croupier: “Your winnings, sir.”

Capt. Renault (in a much softer voice): “Oh, thank you very much.”

Let’s face it, diehard college sports fans loyal to their universities across the country often have wondered just how much time their student-athletes actually spend in class.

Well, at least on the campus of UNC, there’s a definite answer. Not much.

Call them “irregular classes,” “paper classes” or a “shadow curriculum,” but it’s clear again from former federal prosecutor Kenneth Walstein’s eight-month investigation and report that athletes (and other UNC students) were getting credit for classes they never attended or courses that never existed. They also received high grades for highly suspect work.

The more troubling news is this shadow curriculum of fake classes and no faculty involvement lasted over an 18-year period, from 1993 to 2011, and was promulgated by the university’s Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes.

In that program, academic counselors guided athletes to the suspect courses and went as far as writing down rosters of athletes and what grades they needed to maintain eligibility. That was necessary information for Department of African and Afro-American Studies administrator Deborah Crowder and chairman Julius Nyang’oro in their creation of paper classes and dishing out high grades to athletes.

A lot of blame has to be placed, of course, on Crowder and Nyang’oro, who are gone from the university, but as serious an issue for UNC officials is knowing there was a culture allowing this kind of academic fraud to occur unabated for almost two decades.

Wainstein concluded there wasn’t sufficient external review of the African and Afro-American Studies Department. That’s obvious. But he also suggested a naive, maybe pompous belief within the school that this kind of fraud at UNC could never happen — so there wasn’t oversight.

How bad was it? There was a slide presentation to the North Carolina football staff in 2009 warning the coaches a shadow curriculum might be disappearing because of the retirement of Crowder.

One slide in particular revealed that counselors from the academic support program were putting athletes in classes meeting degree requirements in which they didn’t have to go to class, take notes, stay awake, meet with professors “or necessarily engage with the material.”

But the bottom of the slide warned in capital letters: “THESE NO LONGER EXIST.”

Without recognizing it, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt borrowed the words of Capt. Renault when she said about the report, “It is shocking, and people are taking full responsibility.”

This will not be the beginning of a beautiful friendship with the NCAA.