So another course – Naval Weapons Systems – has broached the surface at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. We all know about the AFAM courses under Julius Nyang’oro (scroll down), and despite the administration’s insistence that that’s the end of the story, we’ve all been waiting for the rest of the bogus courses to reveal themselves. This one had no tests, no research paper, and was jammed with athletes.

… oh okay the quarterback has a drinking problem… But cast your eye back over these posts (scroll down)… TCU’s got an elaborate student drug cartel going, with football players prominent in the game.

The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.

Duh. If you don’t think tons of people knew and happily enabled academic fraud at the University of North Carolina, I have a Thomas Petee independent study to show you.

Nyang’oro came to UNC in 1984 as a visiting assistant professor and became the African studies department’s chairman in 1992. University officials now admit he never received a review from a supervisor since he was elevated to that position …

Deniability is a beautiful thing. Until you can’t deny anymore.

By the way – UD has always been a big fan of online course evaluations. And this story reveals one of the reasons why.

Evidence shows that some non-athletes who enrolled in the classes did so unwittingly and were dumbfounded to find the class only consisted of a paper assignment.

One such student commented about the Spring 2010 AFRI 370 no-show class on a course evaluation website known as Koofers.

“I am taking the course by submitting a paper with Prof. Nyang’oro and it is a bit daunting,” said the student, who was not identified, in a comment posted in April 2010, long before the scandal was uncovered. “It has to be between 20-25 pages. I wish I was able to take the actual course with him.”

Faculty and administrators too hoitsy or whatever to read course evaluations might want to look at them occasionally. Had anyone at UNC bothered, they would have read, a year before the scandal broke, a description of the AFAM fraud.

There’s one other intriguing angle to this story, and I wonder if it’s true of other jockshops. All the tutors mentioned in this article were women. Fraud gals. Fraud fraus. Why? Soft hearts? Easily manipulated?

Just ’cause your point of pride don’t involve steaming piles of shit on campus for days after a game don’t mean our point of pride don’t involve that!

We’re Texas State, and look what we can do!

Texas State: The Rising Smell of Texas.

This student makes some good suggestions, but when your university is basically a football team plus block after city block of bars, you have to expect violence. And all the drunken fights and gunshots the other night were after the University of South Carolina won its game.

Of course you can bear down with incredible numbers of police (the area already has security cameras everywhere), so that in the days following the mobs you arrest some people and try to scare other people — in anticipation of the next game, which is against Georgia. Yeah, you heard that right: Georgia. Get ready to roll.

The 7 p.m. kickoff for the Georgia game will add to his department’s challenge, [the police chief] said. Crowds always are larger and more rowdy after night games because they have been tailgating for hours before the games.

So on the Thursday after the post-victory violence, the police picked up a couple of University of South Carolina students just doing the sort of harmless hijinks you associate with college kids out at night:

The arrests, one for unlawful carrying of a pistol and resisting arrest, the other for hit-and-run and drug possession, follow a particularly violent weekend in Five Points in which two men were injured in mob assaults and a woman’s car was damaged by gunfire after the Gamecocks’ victory over the Missouri Tigers Sept. 22 at Williams-Brice Stadium.

Haha the old unlawful carrying of a pistol and hit and run! Kids today!

These are the sorts of empty words one expects from the Knight Commission, whose function is to move athletics-related statements around in the air and on the page.

“Otherwise,” Charles Curtis goes on to warn in The American Prospect, “something more drastic will have to be done to change collegiate athletic culture.” Ooh, what?? By whom??

… especially on the part of the faculty. But sometimes faculty pipe up.

Jay Smith, who teaches history at this month’s scandal-plagued darling, Chapel Hill, has piped up.

The Chancellor (who has so mismanaged all the sports scandals that he’s resigning) did his I’m Shocked We’re All Shocked shtick for the faculty, and I guess most of them bought it. Except for Smith.

[O]ne professor, Jay Smith, challenged Thorp on the university’s contention that athletics did not drive the scandal. While he praised the university for the reforms, Smith said the university has not been as forthcoming as it should have been.

He cited the last no-show class [Julius] Nyang’oro taught, AFAM 280, which Nyang’oro created two days before the start of a summer 2011 semester and quickly filled with football players. News & Observer records requests revealed the athletes-only class, which prompted an ongoing criminal investigation.

“The existence of that course alone provides very powerful evidence that the Nyang’oro scandal was all about athletics,” said Smith, a history professor.

He also asked why the university declined to check a test transcript from 2001 that The N&O found on a UNC website that turned out to be that of Julius Peppers, a football and basketball player who is now an All-Pro defensive end for the Chicago Bears. The university had insisted the transcript was fake but did not check records to make sure.

“Instead of confirming the reality of the record and then moving to protect that student’s privacy, the university ignored The N&O’s questions and left that transcript on a publicly accessible website, where it was available for later plundering by N.C. State fans,” Smith said.

Stories like this one always remind UD of the university administrator who, at a conference on university athletics, insisted that the way to overcome the separation between faculty and coaches was to make coaches professors. “Coaches are just like professors,” he said. “Essentially they are professors – people paid at universities to teach students. They should be regular tenured faculty.”

It’s intriguing to think about the Rate My Professors page of Billy Gillispie, Bobby Knight, Mike Leach, Mark Mangino… Instead of the Helpfulness category, you’d have Abusiveness (Physical) and Abusiveness (Mental).

Maybe you’d reserve those categories for certain classroom professors too, but only if, during discussion, they had a tendency to shout You worthless piece of shit and Hey pussy pussy at students; and, when seriously annoyed, concussed them.

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As to lecture content:

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…

Farewell to the most famed member of our academic community.

[D]angerously myopic … self-aggrandizing … [a Mussolini] in wingtips …
“I’d wake up every day and be afraid,” [one of Billy Gillispie’s players] says… [A] lunatic who has them running the stadium steps, barking like a mad dog at the moonlight… Six months after being fired at Kentucky, he received his third DUI in a 10-year span.

Texas Tech. A community of scholars.

… for as long as I’ve been following it. But now that they’re on a losing streak, the crowds are pissed.

I mean, they’re always pissed. But now they’re also pissed.

University of Kentucky police will increase their presence at the next UK home football game as a result of fights among tailgaters outside Saturday’s game against Western Kentucky.

Police are getting wounded as they try to break things up.

More police will be patrolling at future games. So.

That will be expensive. Great use of money for a university.

And that will be hyper-surveillance. Always fun at a sports event. But if your fan base is made up of jerks …

Of course a lot of these people aren’t students. They aren’t even fans. Why watch a shitty team play? They’re there because violent drunks love a tailgate. Any tailgate.

This year, our team’s opening game against William & Mary drew the smallest crowd for a season opener since 1997. A staff editorial on Sept. 14, “Win or lose, root for the home team,” commented on this disappointing turnout, saying fans need to amp up their school spirit if they want the Terps to play better. I say, why?

One of the many degradations of being a student at a jock school is that people are constantly after you to show enthusiasm for the team.

From the school’s point of view, you’ve got keep the spirit amped because the school has invested zillions of dollars and taken out insane loans to keep the sports thing cranked, and if you fail to be the sort of person who pees his pants at the prospect of paying tens of thousands for luxury boxes and season tickets the school is fucked.

From your fellow students’ point of view, the growth of a party of unamped peers provokes cognitive dissonance, the alienation effect, a crisis of bad faith, acedia, ennui, dark nights of the soul, and nihilistic panic. They are like the people on this tourist bus.

The university has permitted drinking in the football stands, and the results may surprise you.

We had beer spilled on us three times; a fight broke out in the row behind us over the unspeakable sin of wearing a nonmaroon visor, and those of us who spent the better part of the entire game trying to keep the peace received multiple offers to have our faces rearranged.

Whoda thunk it?

The man who – until his recent firing – presided over endless sports, academic fraud, and sports-related misuse of funds cases at the University of North Carolina was a saint. A saint. He did his best. He was powerless.

Big-time college athletics have long been a minefield for university administrators. They often find themselves at the mercy of highly paid coaches under intense pressure to recruit top players – who may struggle academically – and wealthy boosters who want successful teams.

… A 2009 Knight Commission survey of university presidents and chancellors found many of them feel powerless to stop or slow the financial arms race in athletic departments that has often brought scandal.

“(P)residents would like serious change but do not see themselves as the force for the changes needed,” the report said.

As poor little David Boren of Oklahoma University says of the coaches’ salaries there, “We can’t control the marketplace.”

These guys can’t do anything! They’re only the president.

He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.

You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.

Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.

A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”

Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:

[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.

What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?

See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.

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Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.