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 “everybody does it” sentiment is so widely held when it comes to academic fraud and big-time college athletics that it’s almost impossible for any individual instance to shock or even register with the national public anymore. It doesn’t matter that UNC athletes received a collective GPA of 3.61 in their “paper” classes and a 1.91 in their “real” ones; this isn’t the type of cheating that grabs attention these days. Show us some money changing hands or a star player getting caught stealing something funny from an easily mockable location. Give us something we can turn into a joke that will make our co-workers laugh.

Eventually this country will begin ranking colleges exclusively in terms of how academic their sports scandals are. The more scholarly content in the scandal, the higher the college’s academic rating.

… FAMU is like any other American university.

[A lawyer for the defense in the Florida A&M marching band hazing/manslaughter trial noted that] students at the University of Florida have organized “Tough Mudder” teams for a competition so demanding and hazardous that participants are required to sign a “death waiver.” He also noted that University of Central Florida students have volunteered to compete in the “Warrior Dash,” an obstacle race that includes a crawl through a tent known as the “Poop House.”

… two months.”

Look sharp, lads! At schools like yours, the two-month number is usually closer to ten.

When there’s a university in your midst, it so heightens the tone.

The Morgantown Police Dept. ordered equipment and supplies officers would need to better control a crowd or riot in the future. The inventory, which totals $28,209.13, includes riots shields, smoke rounds, pepper spray cans and pepper balls, gas masks and equipment needed to release pepper balls into a crowd.

Who came up with the idea putting the word “University” together with “West Virginia” in the first place?

At the two minute mark on Weekend Update, University of North Carolina students defend themselves.

Al Sharpton on the people who run the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

He’s got a point. Sports/money types exploiting black athletes.

Owen needs to explain more than her failure to mention to anyone a grotesque situation in the AFAM department. In response to a “Board of Governors member who asked [Owen in 2012] if the academic support staff was steering athletes to particular classes,” she responded:

“I hope not. I believe that they understand their responsibility to support the student and to help them make wise choices, but it is not in their purview to direct students to particular courses.”

However – given the fact that she’s been disciplined – she probably knew perfectly well that that’s exactly what was happening: Academic support staff were steering athletes to bogus classes.

Then there’s Owen’s remarkable lack of curiosity.

[Owen] learned roughly nine years ago that the department was offering far more independent studies than it could manage, and told [head of AFAM chair Julius] Nyang’oro to reduce them, the report said. But she never investigated why there were so many in the first place.

Yes, Julius, how about bringing them down from 150 to, say, 100? That would be more seemly…

It all makes UD nostalgic for Thomas Petee, chair of Auburn University’s “dumping ground for athletes,” aka the sociology department. Petee, like Nyang’oro, worked his balls off, typically taking on dozens and dozens of independent study students a semester.

Indeed, keep in mind, if you want to create a dumping ground for athletes in your university, that these guys – Petee and Nyang’oro – were both department chairs. That’s important. For bogus course schemes to work at maximum efficiency at sports factories like Auburn and Chapel Hill you really need a department chair to run them, because chairs have more institutional power than regular faculty, and because regular faculty in totally deeply corrupt departments can be counted on to keep their traps shut. They don’t want to piss off the chair, who must be hugely powerful – untouchable – if he’s able to get away with what he’s been getting away with for decades.

It’s obviously icing on the cake if you’ve got a dean in on it too.

Lord help me I know I shouldn’t watch these poor fuckers on the field but I can’t help it. Dear God…

Yet another anguished confession from a guy announcing his impending self-lobotomy in preparation for the University of North Carolina’s next basketball game.

UD has been collecting such confessions. There are so many. I know I have to be a moral degenerate and a cretin to watch these university-sponsored events, but sweet Jesus I cannot stop myself. Pretty much every guy with a keyboard is acknowledging to the world the failure of his efforts to rebuke the satanic rot of big-time university football and basketball.

I-have-sinned-wise, the industry standard is of course Brother Jimmy, whose weakness was the ladies. But Satan’s as hard at work on the basketball court as he is in the house of ill-repute, and UD is disappointed to see so many men give up the fight for their souls before it’s really gotten started.

[T]he “free” education argument [made by the NCAA and others who oppose paying university athletes] presumes that athletes actually get an education. The academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina is the latest evidence that schools care more about keeping athletes eligible than actually educating them.

… [NCAA member schools] don’t really believe their argument that amateurism is an essential component of their business model. Athletics administrators and coaches know that paying players at market rates would mean less money to pay the salaries of athletics administrators and coaches.

In college sports, managers are allowed to negotiate their own (bloated) salaries and don’t want to share a bigger piece of the pie with athletes. College athletes are both the labor and the product in big-time sports but don’t have that same economic freedom. Yet there are still plenty of hypocritical people who support the NCAA’s exploitative system while telling athletes to be happy with the “free” education.

Whatever that “education” is worth at North Carolina and elsewhere.

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.

Uh, let’s see… Yes.

Jane Stancill, News Observer:

In 2012, when former Gov. Jim Martin unveiled the last report into academic fraud and no-show classes in African and Afro-American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, the leader of the faculty, Jan Boxill, called the report “disturbing,” and “astonishing.”

Wednesday’s report from Kenneth Wainstein showed that Boxill, a faculty member who served as a counselor for the UNC women’s basketball program, had little reason to be astonished.

Boxill was directly involved in sending students’ work for the classes, Wainstein’s report said, and went so far as to suggest the grades her players should receive.

In one email exchange Wainstein uncovered, Deborah Crowder, the department secretary and mastermind of the scheme to set up the no-show classes, responded when Boxill forwarded a paper for a women’s basketball player in 2008.

“Did you say a D will do for (the basketball player)?” Crowder wrote to Boxill. “I’m only asking because 1. no sources, 2, it has absolutely nothing to do with the assignments for that class and 3. it seems to be a recycled paper. She took (another class) in spring of 2007 and that was likely for that class.”

According to the report, Boxill replied: “Yes, a D will be fine; that’s all she needs. I didn’t look at the paper but figured it was a recycled one as well, but I couldn’t figure out from where.”

… Boxill is a senior lecturer in the philosophy department and was chair of the faculty from 2011 to earlier this year. She directs the university’s Parr Center for Ethics.

But sometimes things happen that make her reconsider …

For instance, without PowerPoint, the slide (the “insane slide,” as an Australian newspaper calls it) specifying the advantages of bogus classes for athletes at the University of North Carolina would never have surfaced.

Let me provide some background. The slide was prepared at a moment of great sorrow among athletics counselors and team officials at UNC: Their academic mainstay, Deborah Crowder, who for years administered the school’s vast and venerable bogus curriculum, had just retired, leaving the university at a loss. (Some traditions, I guess, are difficult to hand down. Though UD does have to wonder why Crowder failed to groom a successor. Shows a lack of commitment to the school, I think.) Amid general panic, the two groups – the counselors and the athletics staff – met to keen over the fact that (as the investigative report puts it) “Crowder’s retirement would require the whole football program to adjust to a new reality of having to meet academic requirements with real academic work.”

Just in case some of the assembled mourners didn’t, uh, get what this meant, one of them prepared a slide which stated as simply and explicitly as possible what they had lost:

WHAT WAS PART OF THE SOLUTION IN THE PAST?

WE PUT THEM IN CLASSES WHICH MET DEGREE REQUIREMENTS IN WHICH:

THEY DIDN’T GO TO CLASS
THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO TAKE NOTES, STAY AWAKE
THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO MEET WITH PROFESSORS
THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION OR NECESSARILY ENGAGE WITH THE MATERIAL

THESE NO LONGER EXIST!

With PowerPoint, we have a permanent record of this poignant moment in the history of the University of North Carolina – the moment when the implications of Deborah Crowder’s absence began to sink in.

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

Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning …the U.N.C., Chapel Hill, chancellor said that a reason the paper class scheme thrived for so long [twenty years] was that it was hard for anyone to imagine that something so beyond the pale could happen at all.

“It was such a shock that it was hard for people to fathom,” she said.

Nice try.

How long can people remain in a state of surprise? Ever since – at enormous student and taxpayer expense – the University of Minnesota’s new football stadium opened in 2009, every dumbass prediction about its success has been ground into dust. Read UD‘s posts about it. (Scroll down.)

As desperation sets in (there are loans to pay off!) bribery and coercion have begun.

Minnesota offered student packages for men’s hockey and men’s basketball tickets — but only if students also bought slower-selling football tickets. But after students and Gov. Mark Dayton earlier this month complained — the governor said he was “appalled” by the practice — the school adjusted its policy. Forty-two students were given a refund, the school said.

Why wasn’t the governor (he wasn’t governor then, but he was a citizen) appalled when the state went ahead and let the University of Minnesota take all that money and build a failed stadium – one that can’t even get the university’s students to attend games in any significant number? There were already, back then, dark omens that the university had tightened admissions standards to the point where a shocking number of admits didn’t give a shit about football. Why didn’t anyone heed the omens and roll back, say, literacy requirements?