Chapel Hill’s Eminent Distinguished Plagiarist

The recent academic history of UNC Chapel Hill is really stinky — just a shitload of scandals — so you might think faculty and administrators there would be superduper careful not to add to the world’s growing sense that a once-respectable school has become a cesspool. But the awesomely titled vice-chancellor — FOR RESEARCH — a man not only eminent, but also distinguished, has been outed as a plagiarist.

In a grant application … but you and I know that soon enough many other instances of his plagiarism will be uncovered… though he seems to have convinced the ninnies at Chapel Hill that this is his one and only eminent distinguished theft from multiple sources, cuz they’re not really punishing the dude.

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Remember UD‘s tripartite plagiarism scheme (refresh your memory here). In this instance, we have Category One: ATELIER. Dude’s simply too esteemed and illustrious to bother writing his own grant applications or (UD feels certain we’ll discover) research papers, etc., etc. He relies on an atelier, his very own workshop of Santa’s elves, to do all his work for him, and he has fallen victim to the same thing all the other busybusybusy atelier-overseers (see oodles of Harvard law professors) fall victim to – he doesn’t review the work that goes out under his name. If you’re going to oversee, you need to oversee!

In short: I didn’t plagiarize! The dumb-dumbs that plagiarize on my behalf plagiarized. I give you my pledge: There’s gonna be a helluva shakeup on my staff and the new crew will know how to plagiarize and not get caught.

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Mr UD: “A reasonable punishment would be a fifty percent reduction in his adjectives. He’s currently the Kay M. & Van L. Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of Genetics. The choice is his, but he must lose either Eminent or Distinguished.”

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Update: Yeah. Well. Initial reports that he’d get a slap on the wrist sounded way dumb to ol’ UD, and, as she suggests up there in this post, you don’t deal with a plagiarist in that way. You fire a plagiarist. Esp. one in charge of research for the whole school! Mamma mia.

And that is now what has happened.

Terrific, thoughtful piece in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill student newspaper…

… about the sordid sell-out (“probably the most damaging thing I’ve seen personally”) its curriculum turned out to be in the exposure of its world-famous athletics scandal. The article is, in the words of Roger DeBris, drenched with historical goodies, including the altogether too fine irony of the provost lecturing UD‘s buddy Jay Smith on the ever-so-important business of curricular integrity:

I strongly believe that University leaders can and should maintain oversight over course offerings, which includes the right to participate in individual course selection decisions. [While faculty have the right to teach, investigate and publish freely,] the exercise of these rights should not interfere with the overriding obligation of an institution to offer its students a sound education.

This from the school whose leaders for twenty years oversaw hundreds of totally bogus courses. This by way of explaining why Jay’s course in the history of the scandal and the corruption of university sports generally just… wouldn’t do… wouldn’t be up to the strict intellectual standards of… oh, let Jay say it:

It’s so great. It’s a great irony, that we had such lax oversight for so long, that completely phantom classes just fell off the radar of the dean’s office and were allowed to propagate, and proliferate, for two decades. And that a course that, in part, examines the culture and the mechanisms that made that failure possible, and puts all of it in historical context, is regarded as suspicious.

It’s the Blanche DuBois syndrome down there, y’all. I mean, when you’re a totally broken down ol’ thing and not only do you not know it, but you’re flouncing around all superior-like…

New faculty at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill must sign a “Community Life Covenant”…

… in the wake of the ongoing Professor Jay Smith… unpleasantness. Beginning in September 2019, all teaching/research hires will be asked to certify the following:


I, _______ _________, having accepted a lectureship/professorship at UNCCH, do hereby swear, with all my heart, all my soul, and all my might, the Faith Priority of my school’s major sports teams (viz., football and basketball). Specifically, I pledge strict obedience to the Gaming Imperatives issued by our coaching staff, as well as by any in-residence professional agents seeking to recruit future clients, as those imperatives relate to professors, tutors, graduate students, and anyone else in a position of responsibility relative to the education of our players.

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UD thanks John.

Chapel Hill’s Notoriously Clueless and Stonewalling Faculty/Athletics Person, Joy Renner…

… gets a university-wide prize for doing her part to maintain the illusion (is there anyone left who actually holds this illusion?) that disgraced jockshop University of North Carolina is a serious institution of higher education.

Chapel Hill’s new awardee (name: Joy)
Gets a prize for maintaining the ploy
That full-time sport jocks
Prioritize Locke
Over the next game against Illinois.

UD’s friend John Shelton Reed is featured in this long Sports Illustrated piece about the UNC Chapel Hill fiasco.

John Shelton Reed,a UNC sociology professor for 31 years, sat on the special-admits committee in the mid-’80s and recalls three athletes – one a men’s basketball player – being admitted with rock-bottom SAT scores of 200. That was possible then under NCAA rules but far from the norm for most UNC athletes. Reed and two colleagues voted no, lost, and moved on. “To this day I regret that I didn’t blow the whistle right then and there,” Reed says.

Also see:

As the athletic budget was expanding from $9.1 million in 1984 to $83 million last year, no one in power saw that a department with that much weight would seduce, intimidate, or alter everything in its orbit.

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“I have hanging in my home office a framed Distinguished Alumnus award that the university was kind to give me about twenty-five years ago. It’s always meant a lot to me. But I look at it now and think, Jesus, do I really want that on my wall?”

Once you’ve had all the trouble Chapel Hill has had, you can’t be too careful.

So UNC has hired Gene Chizik as defensive coordinator for its football team.

… Selena Roberts, a former writer for The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, reported that Auburn [University] committed several NCAA violations under Chizik’s watch.

Several former Tigers players told Roberts, among other things, that during Chizik’s tenure Auburn changed grades to keep players eligible, and that the school offered thousands of dollars in effort to keep potential NFL draft picks from leaving school.

UNC: Clean as a whistle going forward!

Limerick, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

The next student athlete to speak
Is defensive lineman Tydreke:
“Coach told us ‘Test learning disabled.
All courses not AFAM are tabled.
And oh by the way you’re all freaks.'”

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UD thanks Dave.

The Tenth Century Japanese Court Culture of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

“Government during this period was based mostly on precedent, and the court had become little more than a centre for highly ritualized ceremonies,” we are told, and the internal governance of one modern American university (and probably many others) turns out to share just this form.

Professor Julius Nyang’oro, the Big Thinker behind the highly ritualized system of fake classes at UNC, was never, for twenty years, reviewed or cycled out as department chair because, we are told, the leadership of the university thought that would be awkward.” Above all, UNC honors precedent (I’m sure the fake class ritual in one form or other long preceded the Nyang’oro dynasty), ritual (there were no actual classes, to be sure; but there were intricate and abundant ceremonial classes), and the absolute power of a closed aristocratic court.

For everyone else, the UNC dynasty provided that other court, a sweaty arena where the commoners played.

What it’s like on the ground in Chapel Hill.

There’s too much deflection out there already and a pervasive, practiced defensiveness that’s without even a whiff of contrition.

What’s essentially behind that response: Everyone does it. We just got caught.

The Path to an African and Afro-American Studies Minor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Huge numbers of non-athletes took the notorious fake courses staged by the chair of African and Afro-American studies and his administrative assistant. Fraternities in particular, given their close connection to athletes, knew all about them. As the report on the almost twenty year hoax notes:

[When interviewed, members of fraternities] said that some of their non-athlete fraternity brothers took so many of the [bogus] classes that they inadvertently wound up with minors in African and Afro-American studies.

This is a great example of an argument UD has encountered ever since she started writing this blog: Big-time athletics benefits the whole university.

From Department Chair to Just-Recruited Football Player, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill…

… court time is for everybody!

At Chapel Hill, whether you’re a celebrated, veteran professor, or a just-minted freshman, whether you’re in court for criminal fraud or felony larceny, you’re part of the special family of cheaters, liars, and thieves that is the public face of UNC.

You take a school like the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

A school that’s been little other than a school for scandal for as long as UD can remember. Here’s a recent recap of only its very latest scandals.

UNC currently is on probation for wide-ranging major violations in football, including impermissible benefits from agents to players. The football program was given a postseason ban and other serious sanctions, and the scandal led to the firing of football coach Butch Davis, the retirement of athletic director Dick Baddour and ultimately played a role in the resignation of chancellor Holden Thorp.

In addition, the school has been rocked by an academic scandal that centered around bogus classes in the African-American Studies Department. A significant number of athletes – including many football and men’s basketball players – were enrolled in the classes…

With that as context, the timing of a potential legal and NCAA issue involving the leading scorer on the 2012-13 Tar Heels basketball team is hardly ideal.

As another observer puts it:

UNC has become the butt of jokes and the home of collegiate scandals, inquests, NCAA penalties, disgraced university employees, fired professors and departed football coaches, athletics directors and chancellors.

Yet this same observer claims that before this, UNC boasted

centuries of clean living, academic propriety and athletic purity.

Really? Are you prepared to go with that description? I mean, all grody sports schools do this – they all lament a golden age of propriety and purity, now sadly temporarily tarnished… Penn State was amazing on the subject…

Eh. Let ’em.

Let ’em sit in the local bar bawling into their beer about how great and true it used to be.

‘If everybody did it, then everybody would have 98% graduation rates for athletes. If everybody did it, then going decades without an academically ineligible starter would be the norm everywhere instead of only at UNC. The very thing you’ve bragged about for decades as the thing that makes you special is the thing that shows you’re unusual in this regard. Why do you think UNC leads the nation in athlete grad rates? Three years ago, you thought it was some special Chapel Hill pixie dust; given what you know now, isn’t it pretty obvious that it’s because of unusual and elaborate cheating methods?’

The wisdom of commenters. This one even knows how to use a semi-colon. UD bows down.

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Speaking of writing, Scathing Online Schoolmarm is relieved to see wordplay starting up on the last name Peppers. It’s taken far too long. Philadelphia Inquirer:

PEEPING AT PEPPERS’ TRANSCRIPT

Alliteration is the obvious first move, though SOS also looks forward to some pun-seepage.

Pepper is of course part of a famous alliterative Mother Goose thingie:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

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Chapel’s campus posted pickled Peppers’ transcript;
A peek at pickled Peppers’ GPA took place.

It shows how Chapel Hill kept up its pecker
And won the big athletic college race.

Reverse Transcriptase at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

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.

“I certainly trust the basic integrity of our courses and our faculty, and believe they’re doing their jobs,” [the dean of Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences] told [a] UNC system [review] panel. “But it has been a struggle for us, as you know. It has been difficult to convince people that that is true.”

Following the massive academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is essentially following the entire leadership of a school – president, deans, high-ranking faculty – attempting to convince people that this leadership saw no difference between a department flagrantly run for the convenience of its athletics program and all other departments.

These people are attempting to convince us that despite well-established fraudulent procedures along these lines at many big-time sports schools – clustering of players into certain majors, department chairs who are nothing more than tools of the athletic program, tutors who cheat on behalf of players, the use of the designation “independent study” to create rafts of bogus courses – all signs of sports-sponsored academic fraudulence on their campus “escaped attention,” in the words of a dean.

No wonder they are having difficulties persuading us to believe that – despite SUNY Binghamton, Auburn, and all the other recent national academic fraud stories with exactly these elements – no one at Chapel Hill had enough distrust in the integrity of its catering-to-athletes department to investigate even a little. We’re supposed to believe that, until the unfolding of a series of events entirely outside the hands of the school’s leadership, everyone trusted in the integrity of this department and its chair.

It’s tawdry and pathetic. It’s insulting to all of us watching as UNC simply and repeatedly lies. It’s particularly insulting to the taxpayers of North Carolina who pay the salaries of corrupt department chairs and cynical administrators.

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