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.
January 2nd, 2014 at 3:31PM
“Would UNC have tolerated the thorough undermining of an entire academic department other than Afro-American studies?”
Would an entire academic department other than Afro-American studies have participated in this scam?
January 2nd, 2014 at 5:05PM
JND: The answer to that is yes. Petee’s department was sociology. And there are plenty of other candidates for this sort of behavior.
January 3rd, 2014 at 3:47PM
And this, of course, is what makes those of us who seriously study and teach African-American studies really, really angry — at Nyang’oro, for acting like, yes, a Klan (or at least ’80s culture wars) caricature of an Afro-Am chair, and at the university, for failing to have better safeguards against this sort of thing in place (and perhaps for failing to take Afro-Am seriously enough to insist on whatever practices were necessary to keep up standards). I also have to wonder about Nyang’oro’s department colleagues, who perhaps should have had some idea of what was going on, through committee service and the like? But I’m not sure if this was a department, or a program which drew professors from a number of home departments (a common model for “studies” disciplines). If the latter, I understand a bit better how his frauds could have gone undetected. There are some inherent weaknesses in that model (though it can work well). That might be a warning to college presidents who seem very fond these days of setting up interdisciplinary initiatives and institutes and such. Interdisciplinary is good; solid standards and practices and such are also good.