The Florida State music professor who conceived and for years offered a course designed to allow the university’s athletes to cheat; the SUNY Binghamton department chair who, like Thomas Petee of Auburn, runs an entire operation devoted to allowing athletes to cheat — and who, to make things prettier, fired one of his faculty when she complained about corrupt grading and attendance procedures for athletes — why aren’t these guys ever the focus of newspaper articles when the shit hits the fan?
Everybody notices the crooked defiant coach, the hapless sputtering president, the anonymous guys on the academic support staff who sit next to the players as they take the online quizzes and tell them what the answers are — but the professors who make the courses… who police the department for evidence of academic integrity…
These guys are the brains behind the operation! Lose the whore in Human Development and the stooge in Sociology, and game’s off, people. And yet “the public face,” as the New York Times puts it, of SUNY’s scandal is Sally Dear, a mere adjunct in Chair Leo Wilton’s department.
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UD understands that you need whores up and down the line to produce outcomes like Binghamton’s and Auburn’s. Without “see no evil apologists” like Donna Shalala (who may be about to hire the most disgraced medical school professor in the country to run her school’s psychiatry department), the University of Miami couldn’t field what was recently the most violent team in university football; without national embarrassment T.K. Wetherell running it, Florida State couldn’t produce the biggest sports cheating scandal in the country, etc. But why overlook the tenured department chairs who use their curricular and hiring powers to turn large academic units into national laughingstocks?
Someone’s got to give credit where credit’s due; and I guess that someone will have to be University Diaries.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:53AM
Are they the brains behind the operation or interchangeable tiny cogs in the big machine?
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:56PM
do you have advice for what to do with difficult professors? I’m using acceptedge.com right now to match my academic profile with potential schools before the nov 1st early app deadline and i want to get as much information about the college process in general as i can
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:59PM
Well, you’re almost certain to encounter a few difficult — challenging? — professors wherever you go to college. I’d say if they’re difficult but smart and enlightening, put up with it. If they’re VERY difficult and don’t yield much light, drop the class.