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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Why is Auburn University Accredited?


Excerpts from a New York Times article about Auburn University, with UD's commentary in brackets.



An internal audit at Auburn University found that a grade for a scholarship athlete was changed without the knowledge of the professor, raising the athlete’s average in the final semester just over the 2.0 minimum for graduation. [Prepare for the fun rhetoric from Auburn about how this internal audit proves how seriously they take the academic integrity of the institution. The audit was done, of course, only under massive pressure from the national media, and after Auburn tried in every way it could think of to intimidate and shut up the professor who revealed the activity.]


The grade, which was changed to an A from an incomplete, was one of four A’s the athlete received in the spring semester of 2003. None of the courses required classroom attendance. [Say it with me: None of the courses required classroom attendance. Read on to discover that the computerized final exams for these and similar courses featured no supervision.]

The athlete, who was not identified because of privacy laws, received the other three A’s in directed-readings courses supervised by Professor Thomas Petee. Petee was forced to resign as chairman of the sociology department in August because of “poor judgment” in the number of his directed-readings classes, one-on-one courses similar to independent study. [He had hundreds every semester. It's a scandal that this man, who no doubt continues to do something similar to this, remains on a university faculty. He lied about what he was up to. And what he was up to was so deeply wrong that he should have been -- should be -- dismissed.]


... Petee still teaches criminology at Auburn.

The university maintained that the courses, which often involved little work but resulted in high grades, were available to all students, not only athletes. Edward R. Richardson, the Auburn president, considers the issue dead, a university spokeswoman said. Richardson declined requests for comment in person and on the telephone this week. [Irresponsibility and denial at the highest levels.]

The athletic department has maintained that it does not do scheduling for athletes, but the audit showed that someone with knowledge of the system had helped the athlete who received the four A’s and graduated with a 2.01 grade point average.

... The grade was changed without the consent of the instructor listed for the course, the sociology professor Paul Starr. He said he did not teach the course to the athlete that semester and did not recall ever meeting the athlete. [Imagine you're a professor at an American university. You get multiple emails from the university informing you after the fact that you had this and that student in your class -- but you know you didn't have them in your class -- and that you gave them A's -- only you didn't give them any grades at all.]


“It was a phantom student in a phantom class,” Starr said in an interview in his office this week. “The schedule was a very strange one. You don’t cook up a schedule like that yourself. There was obviously some kind of guidance and special allowances with someone who had that kind of schedule.”

Starr said he found out about the grade change, which occurred May 12, 2003, only eight days ago, when he received an e-mail message as part of the internal audit. ...[O]ther sociology department professors [also] received e-mail messages from the auditor this week. [Sociology, never the strongest of disciplines, has really let itself go. It needs to decouple from things like criminology if it wants to avoid recurrences of this sort of thing.]

The e-mail message Starr received Nov. 29 said, “As part of an ongoing audit, Auburn University Internal Audit is reviewing changes made to grades where the documentation was signed by someone other than the instructor of record.” [Are we clear about what's going on at Auburn? People affiliated with the sports program are getting in to the university computer, adding the names of players to professors' class lists, and assigning them A's from those professors.]


It went on to ask Starr about a course in the spring 2003 term, SOCY4300-001, an internship-type course known as field instruction. The e-mail message asked whether he was aware of the grade change and the circumstances that had caused someone else to change it, and whether he had been contacted by anyone about the change.

Starr replied by e-mail to Gottesman that he had taught it one-on-one to “no more than three students over the last 20 years.” He also informed the auditor that he was not aware of the grade change submitted on his behalf. Further, he wrote that he did not enroll the athlete or permit the athlete to take the course.


...[A whistle-blowing professor] said he told [his department chair] of a professor in the department who had been giving unsupervised tests by computer for years.

[The chair] not only stopped that professor, but she also found and stopped another professor who had been doing the same thing.



It'd do Auburn a world of good to lose its accreditation for awhile. It's a whorehouse.

****************************

Update: UD's blogpal Sherman Dorn sends her multiple links covering the sordid and more sordid tale of unaccredited Auburn University. (UD has removed its accreditation. She is confident that official accrediting agencies will also do so.) Although a sordid tale, it is not a complicated one. It's Hawaii's story, and Alaska's. Also Louisiana's. Corrupt states maintain corrupt campuses, fine green quads ruled by fuckwit cronies of the governor's.

It would never occur to the trustees of a place like Auburn that universities have something to do with intellect. The trustees are potentates, with a benign condescension toward the primitives in the stadium rafters. They smile fondly at the ritual of party-and-puke that makes their pupils glad, and they run their little one-party states -- steady-party states -- like the Big Daddies they are.