https://indyweek.com/news/orange/unc-s-s...years-ago/

What follows is a Duke’s quasi-offical stance on what happened. It appeared in the Durham NC Independent in 2012 – Read it very carefully and you will see that two schools are not mentioned and it is as if they never existed. That’s purposeful.

As recounted by historian J. Samuel Walker in his fine book ACC Basketball, an academic study of the league's first 20 years, the seven schools that chose to defect from the Southern Conference and form a new league in 1953 were motivated by two distinct sets of concerns.
On the one hand, Clemson, South Carolina and Maryland, all of which were heavily invested in football, were frustrated by the old Southern Conference's ban on participation in bowl games, instituted in 1951. The drive for reform was strengthened by a major scandal that year at conference member William & Mary, where it was revealed that the football program had altered transcripts, changed grades and pressured faculty members to give players favorable grades.
Ironically, UNC and State College (as NCSU was then known) were two of the strongest proponents of the bowl ban: UNC President Gordon Gray (who controlled both schools' votes) described bowl games as "a non-educational distraction for students, both players and otherwise. ... [T]hey command much spectator interest but contribute little to the underlying values of intercollegiate athletics." Wake Forest President Harold Tribble chimed in, saying, "I am in favor of doing everything we can to restore intercollegiate athletics to the status of general student activities."
This attitude was a major problem for Maryland and its president, Curley Byrd, who had an aggressive strategy to use football success to catapult the university to national prominence. Flaunting the Southern Conference ban on postseason play, Maryland and Clemson chose to play in bowl games on January 1, 1952 (Sugar and Gator, respectively). The conference responded by placing both schools on probation.
That controversy led the football-minded schools to begin considering in earnest plans to break away from the Southern Conference, a large, unwieldy league that still contained much smaller schools such as Washington & Lee. Meanwhile, the so-called Big Four schools (Carolina, State, Duke, Wake) were proceeding on a quite opposite track. At least at the level of institutional leadership, all four were said to favor strong academic standards and reining in the emerging commercialism of college sports. Duke athletic director Eddie Cameron, whose football teams dominated the early ACC gridiron, even forwarded a serious proposal to restrict eligibility for athletic scholarships to students finishing in the top 75 percent of their high school class.
But these schools were equally committed to staying in the game. "Big-time football keeps the persons, the appearance and the general nature of the institution before a large section of the public and gives a wholesome emotional catharsis to the students themselves," said Gray. Duke President Arthur Hollis Edens concurred, stating, "We believe that a sane program of intercollegiate athletics is a constructive influence in the life of a college or university."
Those sentiments help explain why the reform-minded Big Four would choose to join forces with the football-oriented trio of Maryland, South Carolina and Clemson. Gray was willing to relent on the question of a conference-wide ban on bowl participation, but the new ACC did ban freshman eligibility and also established the requirement that players must "be enrolled in an academic program leading to a recognized degree, and should be making normal progress, both qualitatively and quantitatively, toward the degree."

Walker’s book is an apology for Duke and paper’s over the racial and class issues deeply imbedded in their relationships with other schools. In this narrative Duke and Carolina are the leaders of sane college sports policy – a narrative they have bleated for the last 70 years. Notice who is not mentioned in all of this – Virginia Tech or its president Walter Newman. You can always count on Duke and Carolina to toss out a self-serving narrative because protecting their image is paramount.