Duh. If you don’t think tons of people knew and happily enabled academic fraud at the University of North Carolina, I have a Thomas Petee independent study to show you.
Nyang’oro came to UNC in 1984 as a visiting assistant professor and became the African studies department’s chairman in 1992. University officials now admit he never received a review from a supervisor since he was elevated to that position …
Deniability is a beautiful thing. Until you can’t deny anymore.
By the way – UD has always been a big fan of online course evaluations. And this story reveals one of the reasons why.
Evidence shows that some non-athletes who enrolled in the classes did so unwittingly and were dumbfounded to find the class only consisted of a paper assignment.
One such student commented about the Spring 2010 AFRI 370 no-show class on a course evaluation website known as Koofers.
“I am taking the course by submitting a paper with Prof. Nyang’oro and it is a bit daunting,” said the student, who was not identified, in a comment posted in April 2010, long before the scandal was uncovered. “It has to be between 20-25 pages. I wish I was able to take the actual course with him.”
Faculty and administrators too hoitsy or whatever to read course evaluations might want to look at them occasionally. Had anyone at UNC bothered, they would have read, a year before the scandal broke, a description of the AFAM fraud.
There’s one other intriguing angle to this story, and I wonder if it’s true of other jockshops. All the tutors mentioned in this article were women. Fraud gals. Fraud fraus. Why? Soft hearts? Easily manipulated?
Finally a University of North Carolina insider willing to trot out the whole 2+2=5, War is Peace, routine! Anyone can condemn the football and basketball scandal at that school as America’s largest instance yet of the way big-time athletics destroys our universities, and indeed in the past couple of weeks everyone has – in a myriad of opinion pieces – done just that. Lawsuits are flying, alumni are pissed, heads are rolling, etc., etc. It’s Penn State all over again.
Only a few people, under these weighty circumstances, will have the guts to go against the grain.
SOS knew that such people would have to come out of UNC’s business school.
So say hello to Michael Jacobs. Mike, c’mon down! We’re gonna do a close scathe of your prose, because you’ve earned it.
Paragraph #1:
For years we have been hearing about the “athletic” or “academic-athletic” scandal at UNC. Maybe I am missing something, but where was the athletic scandal? Were teams shaving points? Were tennis players intentionally making bad line calls? Were soccer players taking performance-enhancing drugs? Were athletes competing on the field who were academically ineligible?
Establish a peeved, above-it-all, know-it-all tone from the outset and come out swinging. No apologies, no concessions. Your first paragraph should contain no use of the word football or basketball. You are going to concentrate instead on the sports that really matter at UNC, the high-profile revenue tennis and soccer teams.
Paragraph #2:
No doubt, there has been a scandal at UNC. But what happened in Chapel Hill was an academic scandal. This is not just about semantics. How you characterize the problem dictates how you devise the solution.
Jacobs has copied the response to the scandal that the entire leadership of the school attempted before it couldn’t anymore: Nothing to see here sportswise! (Penn State tried exactly the same thing: It wasn’t an athletic or an academic scandal there: It was just this one creepy guy, Sandusky, who showed up on campus occasionally… ) The UNC scandal is simply about bad business practices, and I’m a biz school guy, so I should know. I’m all about getting it done, solving problems, and I’m going to let UNC in on how to get out of this mess because – I’m now going to share one of those impressive b-school insights – ‘How you characterize the problem dictates how you devise the solution.’
This crucial sentence should really be rendered as it appears in its natural PowerPoint presentation habitat:
How You Characterize The Problem DICTATES How You Devise The Solution.
Paragraph #3:
Athletes were not the only ones enrolled in bogus AFAM classes. They might have been the intended primary beneficiary, but the scandal appears to have been germinated and incubated by the academic side of the university. Paper classes were the brainchild of “academicians” in the college of arts and sciences.
The first sentence is correct, and it means not that the scandal therefore was only academic, but that the scandal was endemic to the university as such. That is, it operated throughout all aspects of the institution, including fraternities (frat boys were the other big beneficiaries of the hoax), athletics, administration, and faculty. The second two sentences are incorrect. The scandal was the brainchild of Deborah Crowder in association with coaches, the hilariously titled Academic Counselors, and Julius Nyang’oro. It seems to have enjoyed tacit acceptance everywhere, all the way up to the woman now chancellor at a sports-above-all sister school, University of Kansas.
Note also Jacobs’ penchant for quotation marks. They designate the can-do biz guy’s contempt for the enemy – intellectuality.
Paragraph #4:
The irony is that now a vocal group of UNC faculty members is questioning whether big-time athletics can co-exist with a prominent academic research institution. The corruption of athletics is tainting the pure quest for knowledge, they contend.
SOS says: This is fine. He’s extending his point about stoopid “academicians.” But she would urge Jacobs, on rewriting, to put the words tainting and pure in quotation marks as well. Like this:
The corruption of athletics is “tainting” the “pure” quest for knowledge, they contend.
SOS knows what you’re saying. Put corruption in quotation marks too! But three q.m.’s in one sentence is too many, she contends.
Paragraph #5
The simple answer is yes they can co-exist, as they do at reputable institutions all across the country, if the academicians will run the academic program with integrity.
Here we see the cut through all the bullshit approach of the b-school boys. Simple, pragmatic, nothing fancy, just square your shoulders and get the job done. All you need is the guts, and unfortunately academicians are gutless. Notice that we’re in the fifth paragraph and the words football and basketball have still not appeared. Certainly reputable institutions across the country have been able to run their tennis and soccer programs with integrity. UNC can too, and this is how:
Paragraph #6:
The breakdown at UNC was due to a lack of appropriate controls and accountability systems within the college of arts and sciences. The primary gestation period for this scandal occurred under the watch of a chancellor who was a musician. While universities need scholars in all areas, including music, music is probably not the optimal background to manage a complex $1.5 billion organization.
Cherchez le musicien! You can get some pansy who fiddles while Rome burns, or you can bring in me and the boys to clean up the mess. It’s your choice! It’s your funeral! It’s your Requiem! Your complex organization (suddenly all that stuff about simple has become complex) needs Men, not Mice.
Okay, we’ll skip a bit, as Brother Maynard says.
Here’s the heart of the thing:
Many in the college of arts and sciences squirmed because [the new post-scandal provost] did not come from among their ranks. The fact that he was an expert in organizational control systems and accountability rather than romance languages made some faculty members uneasy. But Chancellor Folt had defined the problem correctly.
It was all those violinists with French poems dancing in their heads who did this to us, who dragged our fine complex institution into the dust! If you want to clean things up, you obviously have to go to the money guys!
Perhaps the scholars in Chapel Hill who are screaming from the mountaintop that we need to purge our research universities of athletics should pause, take a deep breath and internalize an insight from that great scholar Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and they are us.” The best scholars don’t make the best administrators.
Bravo, says SOS. Jacobs has managed to write an entire opinion piece about football and basketball at UNC without ever mentioning either sport. He has also failed to mention the existence of athletic directors and coaches — the people who, as more and more players now attest, ran the scam from on high for twenty years.
I mean, it’s very odd, isn’t it? The fact is that UNC has been following Jacobs’ advice for ages, and that indeed the athletic program was run brilliantly, generating massive profits and wins. So what happened?
What happened is something that the Jacobs model, to its everlasting peril, overlooks. What happened is that one rogue academician squealed. Mary Willingham is what happened, and no university management system, however complexly and pragmatically run, can control for the rare, bizarre emergence of an honest, non-Orwellian person in its midst.
The only way to control for the enemy within is indeed, to use Jacobs’ appropriately Orwellian word, to purge her. So this is how SOS would suggest revising the piece. Add this.
The screaming scholars of Chapel Hill have it exactly backwards: We don’t need to purge our research universities of athletics. We need to purge our athletics of research universities.
Owen needs to explain more than her failure to mention to anyone a grotesque situation in the AFAM department. In response to a “Board of Governors member who asked [Owen in 2012] if the academic support staff was steering athletes to particular classes,” she responded:
“I hope not. I believe that they understand their responsibility to support the student and to help them make wise choices, but it is not in their purview to direct students to particular courses.”
However – given the fact that she’s been disciplined – she probably knew perfectly well that that’s exactly what was happening: Academic support staff were steering athletes to bogus classes.
Then there’s Owen’s remarkable lack of curiosity.
[Owen] learned roughly nine years ago that the department was offering far more independent studies than it could manage, and told [head of AFAM chair Julius] Nyang’oro to reduce them, the report said. But she never investigated why there were so many in the first place.
Yes, Julius, how about bringing them down from 150 to, say, 100? That would be more seemly…
It all makes UD nostalgic for Thomas Petee, chair of Auburn University’s “dumping ground for athletes,” aka the sociology department. Petee, like Nyang’oro, worked his balls off, typically taking on dozens and dozens of independent study students a semester.
Indeed, keep in mind, if you want to create a dumping ground for athletes in your university, that these guys – Petee and Nyang’oro – were both department chairs. That’s important. For bogus course schemes to work at maximum efficiency at sports factories like Auburn and Chapel Hill you really need a department chair to run them, because chairs have more institutional power than regular faculty, and because regular faculty in totally deeply corrupt departments can be counted on to keep their traps shut. They don’t want to piss off the chair, who must be hugely powerful – untouchable – if he’s able to get away with what he’s been getting away with for decades.
It’s obviously icing on the cake if you’ve got a dean in on it too.
Just a little icing on the cake for the chair of African and Afro-American Studies at once-respectable University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. $12,000 for teaching a summer course that didn’t exist … A summer course for UNC athletes …
UD likes the way the campus paper puts it:
… Julius Nyang’oro has been indicted by a grand jury after a year-and-a-half-long State Bureau of Investigation probe found that he allegedly received $12,000 for teaching a class he never taught.
Yes, someone’s finally gotten around to indicting the guy for teaching a class he never taught. What can Chapel Hill say? The latest chancellor (last one resigned in disgrace) insists everything’s hunky-dory now and they’re back to being a real live university, but it sort of goes beyond embarrassing when a highly compensated chair of a high-profile department might go to jail for obtaining property by false pretenses.
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This article lists all the current sports scandals at clown-school UNC.
Clown-school seem a little over the top? The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill offered “more than 200 confirmed or suspected no-show classes going as far back as the mid-1990s, plus more than 500 grade changes that are either confirmed or suspected to be unauthorized.”
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Put Nyang’oro in my search engine for a walk down memory lane.
Of course the academic scandal at the University of North Carolina – in which, in the tradition of Auburn’s Thomas Petee, the corrupt chair of an entire department designed a vast system of totally bogus, basically non-existent courses for athletes – will damage that school very badly for a very long time.
But with the final independent report on the matter – released today – you see the inner workings here, the way the hilarious Faculty Athletic Committee (its chair is a woman who describes herself as having been appointed to lead the committee even though she had “No previous contact with athletics other than occasional attendance at events … I possessed a limited understanding of the breadth of athletics, both its contributions to higher education and its effects on higher education”) said hey forget your concerns; they’re professors, and professors can do whatever the hell they want with their courses.
And that is possibly the most damaging thing of all for UNC — as an academic institution, that is, rather than the jockshop it’s on its way to becoming. Because now all UNC faculty will be subject to serious oversight. The independence (and of course that independence is never absolute in the way the FAC suggested – or it shouldn’t be) the FAC cynically invoked to distract attention from the rot in a corrupt department can no longer be taken for granted among that school’s faculty.
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Update: The Charlotte Observer is correct that this report fails to answer some important questions.
Those findings leave significant unanswered questions about academic fraud. What was the impetus for the no-show classes if there was no personal gain? How did the no-show courses grow to an astounding 216 over the last 15 years, and how and why were they sustained?
On the second question: I’m assuming the chair just executed ye olde Independent Study maneuver, assigning himself twenty or so a semester… Maybe putting the names of other faculty on yet more… I mean, it was all pretend, and he was chair, so he could do pretty much anything he wanted… Including hiring a sports agent professionally involved with a couple of UNC players to teach a course! Whatever genius put together the inept, indifferent Faculty Athletic Committee must have been proud of her work.
On the first question: But there was personal gain for the department chair. In so many ways. Here’s the most obvious:
Last summer, UNC-Chapel Hill professor Julius Nyang’oro received $12,000 to teach AFAM 280 – Blacks in North Carolina. The 19 students enrolled in the course were to learn about the state’s legacy of slavery and racism, and how blacks fought to overcome it.
It is a course that typically involved classroom lectures, research papers and exams, according to syllabi from other UNC-CH professors who taught it. Nyang’oro, the department’s chairman, was expected to teach it that way as well, university officials said.
But Nyang’oro did not hold classes or require any exams. His one-page syllabus said that because of the “compact nature” of the summer schedule, the students would spend that time largely on their own to find one or two black leaders in North Carolina to be the subject of a research paper due at the end of the session.
Nyang’oro taught multiple summer courses, and got more money for being a ‘summer administrator,’ and in all of this he seems to have done nothing at all. Raking it in for doing nothing at all is extreme personal gain.
His secretary, also in on the scheme, continued to get a low salary; but UD‘s going to speculate a bit here about her motives. First, there’s the possibility that Nyang’oro or someone else gave her money under the table, or found a way to give her other benefits (free tickets to games, social access to players). It’s possible that Nyang’oro – a charismatic man by all accounts – charmed her into it. It’s also simply possible that as a loyal, long-serving person (the problem goes back to 1997, if not before), she saw this completely non-controversially as the way things worked. For her, “personal gain” presumably meant keeping her job, since administering bogus courses for athletes was her job.
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UPDATE: The secretary:
Crowder had close ties to the basketball team. She has been in a longtime relationship with a former basketball player, and Martin’s investigation found that in 2008, she had received $100,000 and some Hummel figurines from the estate of the father of a close friend who was the former academic adviser to basketball players until shortly before her death in 2004.
… especially on the part of the faculty. But sometimes faculty pipe up.
Jay Smith, who teaches history at this month’s scandal-plagued darling, Chapel Hill, has piped up.
The Chancellor (who has so mismanaged all the sports scandals that he’s resigning) did his I’m Shocked We’re All Shocked shtick for the faculty, and I guess most of them bought it. Except for Smith.
[O]ne professor, Jay Smith, challenged Thorp on the university’s contention that athletics did not drive the scandal. While he praised the university for the reforms, Smith said the university has not been as forthcoming as it should have been.
He cited the last no-show class [Julius] Nyang’oro taught, AFAM 280, which Nyang’oro created two days before the start of a summer 2011 semester and quickly filled with football players. News & Observer records requests revealed the athletes-only class, which prompted an ongoing criminal investigation.
“The existence of that course alone provides very powerful evidence that the Nyang’oro scandal was all about athletics,” said Smith, a history professor.
He also asked why the university declined to check a test transcript from 2001 that The N&O found on a UNC website that turned out to be that of Julius Peppers, a football and basketball player who is now an All-Pro defensive end for the Chicago Bears. The university had insisted the transcript was fake but did not check records to make sure.
“Instead of confirming the reality of the record and then moving to protect that student’s privacy, the university ignored The N&O’s questions and left that transcript on a publicly accessible website, where it was available for later plundering by N.C. State fans,” Smith said.
Oh my. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is going to have to do a much better job of talking about its latest national scandal if it wants to avoid a significantly worse outcome than its preceding scandals.
Here, for instance, in my headline, you have the athletic director candidly pointing out that his athletes, many of whom were admitted to Chapel Hill academically unprepared for it, get to have full-time jobs plus academic work. How do you think that’s going to work out? How ready are you to believe everyone’s protestation of shock – the president is shocked; the faculty is shocked; everyone is shocked – that an entire department (and probably others – wait for that development) corrupted itself on their behalf?
And given that outrageous corruption, isn’t it striking that, as the university newspaper puts it, the department chair behind it all was “asked to retire”?
Asked to retire? Oh Julius sorry to bother you but now that you’ve destroyed us as a serious university (“Every single UNC degree will now be questioned and doubted by potential employers and other universities throughout the nation.” “Every degree earned here is less valuable now than it was a year ago.”) could you please retire? Here’s a spectacular buyout to help you along…
No, UD doesn’t know anything about a buyout. But shouldn’t she? Shouldn’t we all know the conditions under which this man, who along with his assistant (what were her retirement details?), helped destroy the academic reputation of Chapel Hill (as a sports factory with a bit of academic legitimacy, Chapel Hill was already well on its way toward a national joke; after all, Chapel Hill spawned the AFAM department under Julius Nyang’oro), was asked to retire?
Of course if they were paid big bucks to go away, we know, more or less, where that money came from. Big-time sports at Chapel Hill generate so much cash. Can’t have your football players jeopardizing that money by taking classes. You didn’t admit them to educate them.
Researchers at UNC are exploring the question of how a football player’s transcript got reverse engineered in such a way as to appear plastered all over the national press.
The details of the transcript, particularly the fact that [Julius] Peppers took three independent study courses in the now scandal-ridden [African and Afro-American Studies] department, raise troubling questions amidst the unraveling of one of the most damaging scandals in the University’s history.
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If the transcript does, in fact, belong to Peppers, it digs the university deeper into an already damaging scandal. An internal review of the African Studies Department found that the majority of the aberrant courses were administered beginning in 2007, but this development would mean that the trouble began much earlier. It would also add to the growing speculation that athletes have been specifically pointed toward African Studies classes by counselors assigned to the athletic department.
And speaking of counselors:
Peppers’s agent, Carl Carey was also his academic adviser while at UNC and helped him get a re-test on a failing grade that would have ruled him academically ineligible.
Impressed? Impressed that Carey has worn two hats – agent and counselor? Well, hold on to your hat, because that number is three: Carey also taught at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill!
[AF/AM department chair Julius] Nyang’oro reportedly hired Carl Carey Jr. to teach a course this summer without telling Karen Gil, dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, that Carey is a sports agent.
Wow.
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(UD thanks Dave.)
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Oh – apparently there’s a bidding war for Julius Nyang’oro going on between Auburn and Clemson.