On the flip side... what are you going to do, give diplomas to guys that might have cheated their way through their freshman year? What message does that send to the rest of the students? It's ok to cheat, as long as you don't get caught until you have almost graduated?
I recall Father Jenkins, or maybe Jack Swarbrick, saying that they would not speculate on how far back the cheating went, because they would let the information uncovered by the investigation determine that. I took that to mean that they were not going to target past years, but would look into them as information surfaced during the investigation.
It's a very fair point, but my counter is pretty simplistic.
All crimes have a statute of limitations. For some, its indefinite because timing/circumstances don't matter. For others, it's a small window because it does matter.
If you shine the black light on a motel room, you're going to see the stains. Somewhere between 80% and 98% of students cheat in college. So if you apply this kind of scorched earth methodology to any school in the country, all of a sudden no one would have degrees? It's not pragmatic.
To me, if it's a case of unoriginal assignments being turned in and trying to go back and recalculate GPA or decide credits according to the quantity of assignments that may be "Fs" that's too much. That's way, way too much. If you didn't catch it then, too much time has passed. And on top of that... if you HAD caught it then, a player probably takes a "zero" on the assignment and then corrects their behavior... it's just a really messed up thing to try and retroactively address something like this.
If it was, however, a case of academic "murder" versus "simple assault"... i.e. someone stole research for a Ph.D. defense or something... then I'd fully approve of retroactively stripping degrees. I just don't think the level of "fraud" in this case warrants this kind of witch hunt. But that's just personal opinion.
