Dear Commons Community,
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is reeling after a scandal involving bogus classes and inflated grades was made public. Athletes got easy A’s and B’s in no-show courses over a span of nearly two decades, according to an investigation released yesterday. As reported in The Huffington Post:
“At least nine university employees were fired or under disciplinary review, and the question now becomes what, if anything, the NCAA will do next. Penalties could range from fewer scholarships to vacated wins.
Most of the athletes were football players or members of the school’s cherished basketball program, which won three of its five national titles during the scandal (1993, 2005, 2009).
Athletic director Bubba Cunningham wouldn’t speculate on any possible sanctions.
“We’ll work with the NCAA and work through the report with them as part of our ongoing investigation,” Cunningham said. “That’s going to take some time.”
In all, about 3,100 students enrolled in classes they didn’t have to show up for in what was deemed a “shadow curriculum” within the former African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department from 1993 to 2011, the report by former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein found.
Many at the university hoped Wainstein’s eight-month investigation would bring some closure. Instead, it found more academic fraud than previous investigations by the NCAA and the school.
The UNC case stands out among academic scandals at Harvard, Duke and the Naval Academy, said Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who studies cheating.
“I think the existence of fake classes and automatic grades — you might say an athlete track, where essentially you might as well not have the university at all — I think that’s pretty extreme. I hope it’s pretty extreme,” he said.”
This scandal sadly tarnishes one of the great universities in our country.
Tony
Alyson,
Thanks for the insightful and personal comments.
Tony
As a proud parent/tarheel of a hard-working UNC Chapel Hill graduate I know the value of her education- it shows in everything she’s done, said and felt about her future since graduation. I can also recall the joy in my daughter’s voice the day their beloved bb team won the championship in ’09. The friends she made there were equally bright and hardworking students and they taught my city kid what it was to live among students from more rural environs- to say that she took home forever friendships and lessons learned from her extraordinary classes and wholly dedicated teachers is an understatement. To say that her fellow classmates/basketball stars missed out on that same valuable social experience and top notch education, and traded it for an empty piece of paper whether they signed professionally or not is disheartening on so many levels.
This revelation while not new and often whispered about is now being shouted from the rooftops – it hard to express my disappointment and distaste for the administration in words.
The athletes worked hard to be sure; but the real disgrace is that the schools take in enough money to pay for private tutoring – that these colleges are working with ‘student’ athletes but removed the ‘student’ experience from the equation and did it over the course of decades is a shameful and criminal act – no one believes for a second that this didn’t go to the highest echelon of the college(s) and there needs to be a total top down cleanup throughout the affected colleges and the NCAA system.When public confidence of a public system is shaken like this the whole foundation is rotten and has to be rebuilt from the ground up. This is tar on their history alright.
Not surprising. Not new and novel. Not unique. Not the first. Won’t be the last.
Now that Academe has abandoned all pretensions of being in it to further education, the academic administrators will not hesitate to make their decisions based upon the “bottom line” without regard to any other factors.
[As one who did his MBA concentration in Management, I do not now negate the importance of sound fiscal and financial policies and practices; I do, however, detest the “mission creep” that has resulted in the perversions such as the one at Chapel Hill.].
The same blind obedience to the bottom line has resulted in other perversions of the academic ideals, including but not limited to the University’s (and Union’s) abuses of its Adjunct faculty.
What ever happened to the scholar athlete ideal? The kind such as Bill Bradley, Byron “Whizzer” White, Bill Cosby, et cetera?