← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

The only problem with these otherwise fine remarks…

… is that Glenn Reynolds assumes no one’s noticing.

… When hundreds of fake courses can be taught, to often functionally illiterate students, without anyone noticing, it suggests that there’s not much going on in the way of quality control. UNC isn’t even offering makeup classes for this fake coursework, meaning that the bogus credits will remain on students’ transcripts…

It’s possible that this problem is limited to the University of North Carolina, and that some particularly toxic strain of corruption has somehow infested its lovely Chapel Hill campus. But it’s more likely that UNC isn’t as unusual as all that. Near-illiterate athletes are certainly not limited to UNC…

[I]t’s also quite possible that many classes, taught at many schools, are only a cut or two above the no-show classes that Julius Nyang’oro allegedly offered. Because if you can get away with offering hundreds of bogus classes at a top American university for years before anyone notices, the quality control [in general] isn’t very high.

Everyone notices. Everyone knows: the athletes, of course; the athletics department, the professors, the academic departments, the student body. The local rah-rah media. Unless the shit for some reason hits the fan really really hard (as happened at UNC), no one cares, no one’s going to talk about it, and no one’s going to do anything. And certainly nothing will come of this latest national university scandal, the whole UNC thing. It’ll blow over.

Margaret Soltan, January 17, 2014 9:33AM
Posted in: sport

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=42775

One Response to “The only problem with these otherwise fine remarks…”

  1. Contingent Cassandra Says:

    And it’s probably not coincidental that an increasing number of people in a position to notice (other professors, tutors and other “academic support”) are people on short-term contracts scrambling to make ends meet.

    It would be nice to be able to say that it was a tenured professor who blew the lid off the whole thing, but sadly, that is not the case (instead, a tenured professor was a chief perpetrator, so this becomes one more stone to throw at tenure).

Comment on this Entry

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories