[Mary] Willingham … has said in interviews that she has received death threats and hate mail. [University of North Carolina Chapel Hill] police spokesman Randy Young said investigators have contacted her and “are responding appropriately.”
Why must Willingham die? Because she said this.
… Willingham said her research of 183 football or basketball players at UNC from 2004-12 found 60 percent reading at fourth- to eighth-grade levels and roughly 10 percent below a third-grade level. She said she worked with one men’s basketball player early in her 10-year tenure who couldn’t read or write.
[Interviewer] – [T]he accusation is that this goes back as many as 200 classes into the 1990s and that this department was being used to inflate athletes’ grades. But at this point, has there been any clear connection made between this department, this professor and higher-ups in the athletic department?
[News and Observer Reporter] – No. There haven’t been. The connections have been with the tutoring program for athletes. We obtained, you know, correspondence that showed that the tutoring program, you know, they knew that these classes weren’t meeting.
See how we all have to wait and pretend to be idiots until events force the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to admit the full conspiracy? You know what UD would like to see, just for the fun of it? An interview with UNC trustee and official trustee sports booster Dwight Stone. Dwight heads The Educational Foundation, aka Ram’s Club, and UD‘d love to ask him about what he’s been ramming through that organization … But Dwight’s the top and the tutoring program is the bottom, and it’ll be quite a while, and many bureaucratic layers, before we get to what the most responsible body of all – the board of trustees – was doing while the University of North Carolina went from a university to a punch line.
The modern American university (and professional) football game attracts fewer and fewer inside-the-stadium people (there’s much research and hand-wringing going on about this at the NCAA), but many schools do continue to attract large crowds of pointlessly milling drunks outside the stadium on game day. They piss in the street, get in fights, and occasionally kill each other — not that different from what some of the frats on campus get up to…
As stadiums empty, we can expect to see an imbalance between inside and out, in which a football game is played in front of no one except the band, and at the same time a massive sodden riot is staged outside the game. Universities with on-campus stadiums will have the most to lose as these marauders make their way onto the quads and into the libraries. The University of Georgia has been dealing with the phenomenon for a number of years now, so perhaps it can give other institutions advice on crowd control.
… things must indeed be getting dire.
Three of the four clubs in the [professional football] playoffs can’t sell all their tickets…
[E]ven at the college level, where coaches are paid multiples of millions annually, where loyalty to the old school has all but disappeared and the players, no longer satisfied with a free education (such as it might be) and public adulation before they retire to bagging groceries or drawing unemployment checks, are demanding part of the loot at the gate.
You might think that it would occur to the owners, or university presidents who are the owners at the college level, that strangling the golden goose is not a long-term strategy for success.
Commentary on the University of North Carolina scandal at Bloomberg Businessweek.
Known for rigorous academics, North Carolina allegedly operated a Potemkin department since the late 1990s.
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[Nyang’oro] cannot possibly have executed this massive lie on his own. The university’s provost, James Dean Jr., told the [New York] Times that UNC couldn’t have anticipated or detected Nyang’oro’s 14-year-long reign of fraud. “Universities for a very long time have been based on trust,” the provost said. “One of the ramifications of this is that now we can no longer operate on trust.” That’s laughable.
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Would UNC have tolerated the thorough undermining of an entire academic department other than Afro-American studies? Hard to picture. Could Nyang’oro and those who presumably aided and abetted him have come up with course titles any more likely to please skeptics of black-oriented scholarship?
The first three classes confirmed to have been fraudulent, according to the News & Observer, pretended to offer students training in the Swahili language. An old-time Carolina Klan member couldn’t have conjured that detail in his most virulent daydream.
… is that the school remains – even after Paterno-Sandusky – almost exclusively about sports. Penn State truly seems incapable, even after all it’s still going through, of being a university. It’s as if the citizens of Moscow were still spending most of their time arguing about whether the city should take down a statue of Leonid Brezhnev.
You and I know that big-time university sports is the front porch of the university. We know this because if you Google the phrase you’ll encounter every mentally challenged apologist for the activity repeatedly mouthing it.
We also know that, like most flagrantly corrupt activities, big-time university sports is constantly hitting the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, as millions of shocked Americans attempt to grapple with this week’s astounding unprecedented revelation of academic fraud; misuse of tax money; gun play among the hotly recruited; massively overpaid coaches staggering drunk out of their Hummers and having it out on YouTube with the local constabulatory, blah blah blah.
I don’t mean blah blah blah this is boring; I mean blah blah blah it’s the first of the year and I’m not going to do the whole list.
Respectable big-time sports schools (a vanishing species) attract the attention of the nation’s respectable press, and Exhibit A this morning is the University of North Carolina, which has indeed managed to introduce something unprecedented to the list.
But this shouldn’t surprise us, because the bigger and more, as it were, automated, university sports gets, the more illegal innovations you’re going to see.
So now we have, for the first time, the chair of a major department at a major American university in court for…
What to call it? It’s actually not unprecedented as an activity… Goes on all the time in fact… It’s just that department chairs rarely get caught doing it, and if they do get caught, like Thomas Petee at Auburn and Leo Wilton at SUNY Binghamton, they don’t end up indicted by a grand jury for… Again, what to call it? Theft of courses?
Because think about it. Think about what all of these department chairs (and tons of others like them across the United States) are doing. They are conjuring totally pretend independent studies for hundreds of athletes. You need to understand that absolutely nothing happens here. I can feel you resisting this understanding. NADA. Get it?
The chair, who of course can do what he wants administratively in these matters (I mean, could do… before chairs of university departments became, thanks to Petee, Wilton, and Nyang’oro, not-yet-indicted-co-conspirators…), has his assistant fill out the paperwork or the online stuff, and then has the assistant submit A‘s around the end of the semester, and that is it.
Now all of these institutions – Auburn, Binghamton, Chapel Hill – know precisely what’s going on. They make every effort to appoint and reappoint these guys chair of their departments because the scam fucking works, man. Lots of moveable parts to be sure but the athletes shut up about it, and I mean the chair. He’s the chair! Are other people in the department going to complain? They stand to materially benefit or not from decisions the chair makes.
The NYT seems surprised that the UNC thing went on for decades.
… Mr. Nyang’oro was [reportedly an] inattentive administrator who was often out of the country, even when he was supposed to be teaching. [Campus observers say] that his continual reappointment as the department chairman, a job most professors hold for 10 years at most, reflected the university’s indifference to what was going on there.
Indifference? Full-hearted support, kiddies. Nyang’oro made a big ol’ base salary on top of the big extra money he got for having someone fill out independent study and end of semester grade forms.
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Of course now things are much better at UNC. If you’re looking for an academic job, you can really look forward to working there!
[There are new] stringent controls over the curriculum and faculty in which, for instance, course syllabuses will be monitored, faculty teaching assignments regularly reviewed, and classes subject to spot checks to ensure they are actually meeting.
Yessiree, big-time sports are a boon to the university. They introduce exciting new regimes under which professors, actively distrusted by their universities as a source of fraud, indictments, and front-page New York Times coverage, are now subject to close surveillance.
As UD has said elsewhere, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a professor has only one chance to make a good first impression. Keep your nose clean, UNC guys! You never know when your minders are going to show up.
… the trinity of America’s Christian diploma mills, the three-point theology of our creedal unaccrediteds, the pivot-point ministry of our basketball brethren — UD loves to watch dribblers for the deity at work on her soul.
These college students “focus,” says one team’s coach, “on bringing glory to God in whatever we do,” and losing games by hundreds of points is what they do to bring undecideds like UD to the Lord.
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But the scoffers! O lord, the scoffers!
They are blocking UD’s prayer shot.
Want to make some money? Start a divinity school offering a Bachelor of Theology degree in Pastafarian Studies, and round up some buddies. Troll the coaching forums or hang out at the Final Four, tell coaches you’re the USM Noodly Appendages head coach, and you’ve got an open date on some Saturday in November. Book the game, show up, lose by 100, and cash your $50,000 check.
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To grapple with the theological implications of all this, go here.
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UD thanks Dave.
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Update on one of America’s universities:
– Their website doesn’t load and they don’t have a Wikipedia page
– They do have an regularly updated Twitter:
Are u interested in playing basketball or volleyball for the Champion Tigers? Call 501-623-2272 for more information on our sports programs!
– The person that Twitter says is the school’s president, Eric Capaci, is also listed as the school’s head basketball coach …
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Okay, try this.
Take this painting of Saint Sebastian …
… and imagine him pelted with basketballs rather than arrows. This puts Champion Baptist squarely in the martyrdom tradition.
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Wow. This here’s getting to be a big national story real quick. Google News is going razorback wild!
Now ol’ UD‘s gonna make a perdiction. You jest set there and listen.
Champion Baptist University is in Arkansas, and you don’t gotta read too much University Diaries (put the word ARKANSAS in my search engine) to know that pret’ near the whole state of Arkansas is one big fat insult to the word university. So this here latest thing don’t help.
Airgoe, UD makes the following perdiction. We’re gonna be hearing from Mike Huckabee any minute. Somebody’s gotta step up and defend the state, and that’s gonna be – gotta be – our next president. Y’all hold on and see if I’m not right.
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Attendance: Just a smidgeon over two hundred souls. ‘Course now it’s famous, everybody’s gonna claim they was at the game.
And I know you’ve heard this before on this blog, but I’ve just gotta say it one more time: The whole spectacle was paid for by you and me. Your education taxes at work.
And the tweets keep coming.
My Marketing class had a higher attendance than this Beef O’Bradys Bowl.
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If you watch the Beef O’Bradys bowl, look for me. Trust me you’ll be able to find me, there are 200 people in here.
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What can UD say? Your education tax dollars at work.
But in the world of big-time sports, who listens to them? What do you think this is, an institution of higher learning?
UD has told you about U Mass (gruesome posts aplenty here), so you aren’t surprised that this absurdity has now fired at great expense their new coach, and will soon hire at great expense another new coach. No one comes to the games, so it’s not clear to whom this activity has any relevance.
Oh yeah. U Mass professors. And I guess students.
