Robin Wright, the former coordinator for academic services in the Tennessee athletics department who raised concerns about plagiarized papers last fall, applauded the decision by the school to clear four players of wrongdoing but said issues of "administrative fraud" remain unresolved.

Wright, who in memos alerted her bosses to incidents of possible academic abuse involving tutors last fall, told ESPN.com on Friday that she was glad the players' eligibility was reinstated for Saturday's game against Auburn because she believes tutors -- not the players who worked with them -- were responsible for any alleged incidents of plagiarism.

"It wasn't the players' fault," Wright said. "I would have done the same thing at age 18 because I wouldn't have known" the limits of proper tutoring.

As a result of the school's preliminary investigation into academic fraud in the athletics department, Tennessee president J. Wade Gilley on Friday announced that the school was reinstating four redshirt freshmen -- Leonard Scott, Reggie Ridley, Keyon Whiteside and Ryan Rowe -- that it had suspended before last week's game against Memphis.

Internal memos and e-mail messages sent by Wright, and obtained by ESPN.com, identify two other football players, a baseball player and a female athlete as possibly benefiting from improper tutoring last fall. Tennessee officials say those two football players and the baseball player have transferred to other schools. No findings on those cases were released in Friday's announcement, which only addressed the eligibility of current players.

One of the football players suspended by the university was not cited in the documents acquired by ESPN.com. The University of Tennessee based its suspensions last week on documents that it had acquired independently after learning of the ESPN.com investigation.

Tennessee has not announced when it will complete its internal review into possible NCAA violations. Wright, one of the key figures, said university counsel Ron Leadbetter will be coming to her college in Texas soon for a formal discussion with her. Wright said she plans to fully cooperate with investigation. Still, the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported on Friday that Gilley declared, "There will be no NCAA investigation."

Wally Renfro, NCAA spokesman, would not confirm or deny whether the NCAA has decided to investigate Tennessee. He did say that decisions on eligibility are treated separately from decisions on whether a school violated NCAA rules, and that a school's review typically continues even if players are reinstated for competition.

As the school's investigation moves forward, a key question before Tennessee is: Was information about possible plagiarism involving tutors and athletes properly handled at the time administrators were alerted? And, did the school make enough of an effort to root out and solve any problems of excessive collaboration?

These questions go beyond whether there were individual, confirmed instances of plagiarism.

"Clearly, as far as history is concerned, findings that relate to institutional control are about what type of systemic issues are there," Renfro said. "They are about lack of policy, a lack of having the right monitoring systems."

An ESPN.com report Sunday detailed an apparent failure by athletics department managers to forward to the school's NCAA compliance officials memos last fall from Wright alleging plagiarism by tutors, in possible violation of the Tennessee honor code and NCAA rules.

The News-Sentinel quoted Tennessee athletic director Doug Dickey as saying, "Since no players have been ruled ineligible, there are no violations of institutional-control issues to be dealt with at this time."

However, according to Renfro, a school could be hit with a finding of lack of institutional control -- generally considered a major violation by the NCAA -- even if only staff members, and no players, were cited for wrongdoing. NCAA rules require schools to follow institutional procedures by checking out possible NCAA violations and if they are proven, report them to the NCAA.

"There are any number of violations beyond those that include student-athletes that could lead to a finding of lack of institutional control," Renfro said.

Wright said she intercepted some of the allegedly plagiarized papers before they were turned in for credit, a factor that could work in the school's favor in making its case for minimal sanctions if it is determined violations were committed. However, Wright believes Tennessee should be held responsible for creating a climate of excessive collaboration by hiring untrained tutors and keeping those tutors she believed made a habit of doing too much work for players.

The players saw employees such as Victoria Gray and Roderick Moore, both of whom Wright complained about in memos to her bosses, as "authority figures" whose methods the athletes didn't know were improper, she said. Gray often tutored players with learning disabilities, and Moore was a graduate assistant who ran the study hall.

"I talked to (Gray about plagiarism) for a long time, for about a year, and I had complained because she kept ignoring my instructions and felt that because she was studying (learning disabilities) that she had the right to disobey the rules," Wright said. "The guys, because of her age and degrees, thought of her as an authority figure and she wasn't going to tell them wrong. You're talking about 18-year-olds with no education, and a woman who's in her 50s and finishing her dissertation.

"Roderick was another one who was an authority figure. They saw him just as they did me or (athletics department administrator) Gerry Dickey or anyone who was considered an authority. That was the problem -- the people causing the problems were not the athletes. They didn't think it was wrong."

Neither did Carmen Tegano, Wright said. After becoming coordinator of academic programs in August 1998, with responsibility for overseeing most tutors, Wright attempted to dismiss one longtime tutor, Ron Payne, whose methods she believed were improper. Wright said she was rebuffed by Tegano, who as Associate Athletics Director for Student Life oversees all academic services for men's athletes.

Concerned about her reputation being tarnished, Wright later sent a memo, on Sept. 4, 1998, to her boss, Dickey, explaining that if she could not fire Payne, she did not want him to report to her. Payne stayed on, reporting directly to Tegano, Wright said.

"They liked his results," Wright said in an interview. "That's what they said over and over again when I complained -- they like his results. Grades. He got kids through the classes."

Kirsten Benson, who preceded Wright in the athletics department job earlier in the decade, said she also objected to Payne's "spoon-feeding" of answers to players and made Tegano aware of her concerns. Payne, who has tutored hundreds of athletes over the past decade, is currently under investigation by the university as part of its internal probe.

"Anything like this is hard to prove," said Carl Asp of plagiarism allegations from a year or more ago. Asp is the NCAA faculty athletics representative at Tennessee.

However, a failure by the school to properly check out a potential NCAA violation is more easily verified. Asp and Malcolm McInnis, NCAA rules compliance officer for Tennessee, have both said that Wright's memos should have been forwarded to them at the time they were sent for investigation, even if allegations eventually were proved untrue.

Tegano has denied comment on issues related to the investigation, but reportedly released a statement Friday after Gilley's decision to reinstate the players.

"That action reinforces in my mind that no one in the office of student life or in the department of athletics acted improperly," Tegano said.

Linda Bensel-Meyers, director of composition for the English Department at Tennessee, no longer trusts the athletics department to monitor its own program in good faith. In a Sept. 20, 1999 memo to Leadbetter, chancellor Bill Snyder and other academic officials on campus, Bensel-Meyers called for the academic services for athletes to be removed from the control of the athletics department.

"Here is the lesson to be learned from this history: academic improprieties will stop when all academic tutoring within the Office of Student Life is overseen by an academic official from the (university) campus and not someone involved in sports management within the athletics department," she wrote in the memo.

Bensel-Meyers said she is awaiting response to her letter.

ESPN.com Senior Writer Tom Farrey can be reached at espnet2@espn.com