Lively radio interview with a News and Observer reporter about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud (scroll down).
As with Thomas Petee at Auburn and Leo Wilton at SUNY Binghamton, it’s crucial to have either the chair of a department (like Chapel Hill’s Julius Nyang’oro, about whom the reporter is talking up there in my headline) or a very high-ranking faculty member running the independent studies that athletes find so attractive.
August 15th, 2012 at 2:33PM
I wonder how many nervous administrators across the country are chewing on their fingernails, knowing (or not knowing) what is going on in their own universities.
August 15th, 2012 at 2:35PM
francofou: Surely they know. It’s strange for me to read the language of not knowing from everyone. The eligibility tricks are overt and systemic.
August 15th, 2012 at 5:45PM
My experience is that administrators know and care little about what happens on the street, so to speak. For the most part, they live in a parallel world, removed from contact with what goes on.
Your own blog documents countless cases of shady dealings carried on in the wings.
They tend to be nice, earnest people, but clueless as to what people actually do, are so burdened with needless tasks that they don’t have time to look, or are so hypnotized by their own rhetoric (“This is a great university”) that they are impervious to contrary evidence.
They should know, but they don’t (some do, of course).
August 16th, 2012 at 8:59AM
Many of them really don’t know. They don’t want to know. They have flunkies assigned to make sure that they don’t know. Not only is the office cooler filled with institutional Kool-Aid, there are plates of Plausible Deniability Cookies on every desk.
August 16th, 2012 at 12:46PM
Exactly, Professor theprofessor. A lot of middle-level folks building profiles so that they can move up or out.
I’ve tried to communicate some semblance of reality to administrators (classes consistently not met, intimidation of students, violation of policy, open incompetence, harassment, etc.). It didn’t sit well, and only rarely were there consequences.