University Diaries » “[T]here was a failure in academic oversight for years that permitted this to continue. This too was wrong and it has undermined our integrity and our reputation, and created a very unhealthy atmosphere of mistrust.”

What can a new chancellor do (the last one was booted out after his university’s self-righteousness about its academic integrity ran hard up against its decades of bogus courses) but mouth comforting cliches about past wrongs and glorious futures?

That very unhealthy atmosphere of mistrust thing is interesting. It refers to the fact that now all professors at Chapel Hill are, like marine recruits, subject to spot checks to make sure that they’re actually meeting their classes. Apparently they’re no longer trusted to be doing that…

Yet the reality of recent history at Chapel Hill is that everyone from the trustees and the chancellor on down trusted that no real classes were being offered across a number of departments; they trusted that in this way their revenue athletes would be kept on the field and undistracted by mere academics.

It’s so totally part of the tradition of big-time athletics that now somehow it’s the legitimate faculty at Chapel Hill who have to be folded in to the shit stew cooked up by the athletics department and the university’s administration. Now, because of the money cynicism of provosts and trustees, actual professors are treated like sneaks and fakes. There’s no better demonstration of the way big-time sports destroys the very heart of universities.

But no worries! The new chancellor assures us that she’s nailed 95 theses to the library door, all about how icky and corrupt academics at the university used to be, but now that they’ve done the 95 thingies it’s all great.

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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