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Thursday, December 14, 2006
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"That one little unit there." More efforts on the part of Auburn to pretend that the now-unaccredited university's escalating academic whoredom scandal has nothing to do with athletics. Why is Auburn so eager to claim this? I guess because they're tired -- after decades and decades of scandals -- of getting sanctioned. Sanction-burnout. Of course it's true that what's going on there isn't only an athletic scandal. If it makes Auburn feel any better, lots of non-athletes also enjoyed the grade-changing, bogus course-offering ministrations of faculty whores. There are broader efforts on Auburn's part to deny the school's engrained, systemic corruption. The president insists that the latest obscenities, in which someone seems to have gone online and added students and high grades to unsuspecting professors' gradesheets (Professor James Gundlach, who uncovered the bogus course scandal, correctly says that "if it is proven that someone changed grades without a professor's knowledge, it could represent a breach of academic integrity much greater than this summer's scandal. ...[The grade changes] represent something far more serious than [the chair of sociology] giving away grades in courses that he had students in.") are "strictly within that one little unit there," meaning the extensive sociology/criminology/whatever program that seems to be pimp-central. But only an idiot would believe that stuff like this doesn't go on in other units at Auburn. In fact, it is UD's assumption that the prostitution of academic life there has merely shifted location. If there's another James Gundlach in another unit, he or she should be prepping for some media attention. Says in the Huntsville Times that Petee (sociology chair) could lose his tenure and his job. Don't bet on it. And don't forget that he was chair of the sociology department. One of the most corrupt professors UD's ever heard of was chair of a department at Auburn. His activities would have gone undetected had a very determined colleague not stood up to derision and intimidation from the university to press his claims against him. Auburn has resisted and denied every step of the way, and it'll continue to do so. That's why only the same idiot would believe the bullshit the Huntsville Times writer fell for -- the happy talk from Auburn with which the reporter decided to end his article: ...Painful though it may be, Richardson said the process of dealing with the controversy that started last summer has made Auburn better and stronger. "This is clearly something we take very seriously, and we will follow it to the end," he said. "It's like going to the doctor and taking shots. I don't like to take shots. We had a policy in place before, but it was not systematically administered as it should have been. It's an embarrassment to us." I understand why locals would like to believe that a little unit of Auburn came down with a little condition for which it had to go to the doctor. No one wants to hear they've got tertiary syphilis. ******************************* One more thing: Just checked Petee's university webpage. It's much better than it used to be. It used to have a photo of him and a description of him as department chair. Now there's no photo and no mention of his being chair -- instead, there's a pair of handcuffs. |