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?
October 1st, 2012 at 7:24AM
I’m glad Prof. Nyang’oro had staff help. When I was reading about how many HUNDRED independent studies he was conducting I couldn’t imagine him getting through all the paperwork alone.