… about the sordid sell-out (“probably the most damaging thing I’ve seen personally”) its curriculum turned out to be in the exposure of its world-famous athletics scandal. The article is, in the words of Roger DeBris, drenched with historical goodies, including the altogether too fine irony of the provost lecturing UD‘s buddy Jay Smith on the ever-so-important business of curricular integrity:
I strongly believe that University leaders can and should maintain oversight over course offerings, which includes the right to participate in individual course selection decisions. [While faculty have the right to teach, investigate and publish freely,] the exercise of these rights should not interfere with the overriding obligation of an institution to offer its students a sound education.
This from the school whose leaders for twenty years oversaw hundreds of totally bogus courses. This by way of explaining why Jay’s course in the history of the scandal and the corruption of university sports generally just… wouldn’t do… wouldn’t be up to the strict intellectual standards of… oh, let Jay say it:
It’s so great. It’s a great irony, that we had such lax oversight for so long, that completely phantom classes just fell off the radar of the dean’s office and were allowed to propagate, and proliferate, for two decades. And that a course that, in part, examines the culture and the mechanisms that made that failure possible, and puts all of it in historical context, is regarded as suspicious.
It’s the Blanche DuBois syndrome down there, y’all. I mean, when you’re a totally broken down ol’ thing and not only do you not know it, but you’re flouncing around all superior-like…