North Carolina has hired an outside attorney to conduct yet another independent review of irregularities in an academic department featuring classes with significant athlete enrollments.

The school said Friday that Kenneth L. Wainstein — a 19-year veteran of the U.S. Justice Department — would look into any additional information that might become available from a criminal probe into fraud in the formerly named Department of African and Afro-American Studies dating back to the late 1990s.

The probe led by Orange County district attorney Jim Woodall has led to the indictment of the former department chairman for receiving $12,000 to teach a lecture course filled with football players that he instead treated as an independent study requiring only a paper in summer 2011.