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.
… is that the school remains – even after Paterno-Sandusky – almost exclusively about sports. Penn State truly seems incapable, even after all it’s still going through, of being a university. It’s as if the citizens of Moscow were still spending most of their time arguing about whether the city should take down a statue of Leonid Brezhnev.
… is the familiar three-step featured at American medical schools like Emory University.
Emory University has mainly been known as the forcing ground of conflict of interest giants like Charles Nemeroff. Yet while plenty of other American med schools feature COI gone wild, Emory couples COI with high-profile, frequent retraction of fraudulent articles.
How high-profile? Chair of the department of medicine.
How does he manage to have produced (so far) six retracted papers?
Well, as lab honcho, he puts his name on stuff that goes out whether he’s had anything much to do with what’s been written.
This is known as guest writing or courtesy authorship (discussion of the practice here) and it accounts for the fact that when you look at any random med school jerk’s cv it’s going to say he’s published eight hundred articles. Everybody’s sticking their name on everybody else’s paper. It takes a village.
So step one is courtesy authorship. Step two, because you’re too important to notice conniving actual-author underlings, is retraction.
Step three is your amazing retirement party, where without irony people say things like “What is important is not just the quantity of Dr. [Wayne] Alexander’s work, but the quality.”
… singing with Rufus Wainwright, honoring Billy Joel, at the Kennedy Center Honors.
You and I know that big-time university sports is the front porch of the university. We know this because if you Google the phrase you’ll encounter every mentally challenged apologist for the activity repeatedly mouthing it.
We also know that, like most flagrantly corrupt activities, big-time university sports is constantly hitting the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, as millions of shocked Americans attempt to grapple with this week’s astounding unprecedented revelation of academic fraud; misuse of tax money; gun play among the hotly recruited; massively overpaid coaches staggering drunk out of their Hummers and having it out on YouTube with the local constabulatory, blah blah blah.
I don’t mean blah blah blah this is boring; I mean blah blah blah it’s the first of the year and I’m not going to do the whole list.
Respectable big-time sports schools (a vanishing species) attract the attention of the nation’s respectable press, and Exhibit A this morning is the University of North Carolina, which has indeed managed to introduce something unprecedented to the list.
But this shouldn’t surprise us, because the bigger and more, as it were, automated, university sports gets, the more illegal innovations you’re going to see.
So now we have, for the first time, the chair of a major department at a major American university in court for…
What to call it? It’s actually not unprecedented as an activity… Goes on all the time in fact… It’s just that department chairs rarely get caught doing it, and if they do get caught, like Thomas Petee at Auburn and Leo Wilton at SUNY Binghamton, they don’t end up indicted by a grand jury for… Again, what to call it? Theft of courses?
Because think about it. Think about what all of these department chairs (and tons of others like them across the United States) are doing. They are conjuring totally pretend independent studies for hundreds of athletes. You need to understand that absolutely nothing happens here. I can feel you resisting this understanding. NADA. Get it?
The chair, who of course can do what he wants administratively in these matters (I mean, could do… before chairs of university departments became, thanks to Petee, Wilton, and Nyang’oro, not-yet-indicted-co-conspirators…), has his assistant fill out the paperwork or the online stuff, and then has the assistant submit A‘s around the end of the semester, and that is it.
Now all of these institutions – Auburn, Binghamton, Chapel Hill – know precisely what’s going on. They make every effort to appoint and reappoint these guys chair of their departments because the scam fucking works, man. Lots of moveable parts to be sure but the athletes shut up about it, and I mean the chair. He’s the chair! Are other people in the department going to complain? They stand to materially benefit or not from decisions the chair makes.
The NYT seems surprised that the UNC thing went on for decades.
… Mr. Nyang’oro was [reportedly an] inattentive administrator who was often out of the country, even when he was supposed to be teaching. [Campus observers say] that his continual reappointment as the department chairman, a job most professors hold for 10 years at most, reflected the university’s indifference to what was going on there.
Indifference? Full-hearted support, kiddies. Nyang’oro made a big ol’ base salary on top of the big extra money he got for having someone fill out independent study and end of semester grade forms.
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Of course now things are much better at UNC. If you’re looking for an academic job, you can really look forward to working there!
[There are new] stringent controls over the curriculum and faculty in which, for instance, course syllabuses will be monitored, faculty teaching assignments regularly reviewed, and classes subject to spot checks to ensure they are actually meeting.
Yessiree, big-time sports are a boon to the university. They introduce exciting new regimes under which professors, actively distrusted by their universities as a source of fraud, indictments, and front-page New York Times coverage, are now subject to close surveillance.
As UD has said elsewhere, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a professor has only one chance to make a good first impression. Keep your nose clean, UNC guys! You never know when your minders are going to show up.
(The last section of John Logan’s The Bridge of Change.)
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Who can stand these juxtapositions of person and place and time? I walk across the Bridge of Change where I have so often watched by the towers of the Conciergerie. Now, water laves a little higher up the stair from the River to the Quay, hiding some of the steps from me. Boats nudge at the edge. I walk along the Boulevard past the great gold and blue corner clock, the ornate wrought-iron gate and fence of the Place of Justice (its name changed from the time of kings), past the shadow and spire of Sainte Chapelle. I cross the Bridge of Saint Michel into the Latin Quarter. But I do not look for the Street of the Cat Who Fishes or the Street of the Harp. I turn right, wandering a bit, and suddenly, as if by chance, find myself at this street, and here I will wait, for it is our street, Rue Gît le Coeur: Here Lies the Heart.
… the trinity of America’s Christian diploma mills, the three-point theology of our creedal unaccrediteds, the pivot-point ministry of our basketball brethren — UD loves to watch dribblers for the deity at work on her soul.
These college students “focus,” says one team’s coach, “on bringing glory to God in whatever we do,” and losing games by hundreds of points is what they do to bring undecideds like UD to the Lord.
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But the scoffers! O lord, the scoffers!
They are blocking UD’s prayer shot.
Want to make some money? Start a divinity school offering a Bachelor of Theology degree in Pastafarian Studies, and round up some buddies. Troll the coaching forums or hang out at the Final Four, tell coaches you’re the USM Noodly Appendages head coach, and you’ve got an open date on some Saturday in November. Book the game, show up, lose by 100, and cash your $50,000 check.
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To grapple with the theological implications of all this, go here.
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UD thanks Dave.
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Update on one of America’s universities:
– Their website doesn’t load and they don’t have a Wikipedia page
– They do have an regularly updated Twitter:
Are u interested in playing basketball or volleyball for the Champion Tigers? Call 501-623-2272 for more information on our sports programs!
– The person that Twitter says is the school’s president, Eric Capaci, is also listed as the school’s head basketball coach …
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Okay, try this.
Take this painting of Saint Sebastian …
… and imagine him pelted with basketballs rather than arrows. This puts Champion Baptist squarely in the martyrdom tradition.
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Wow. This here’s getting to be a big national story real quick. Google News is going razorback wild!
Now ol’ UD‘s gonna make a perdiction. You jest set there and listen.
Champion Baptist University is in Arkansas, and you don’t gotta read too much University Diaries (put the word ARKANSAS in my search engine) to know that pret’ near the whole state of Arkansas is one big fat insult to the word university. So this here latest thing don’t help.
Airgoe, UD makes the following perdiction. We’re gonna be hearing from Mike Huckabee any minute. Somebody’s gotta step up and defend the state, and that’s gonna be – gotta be – our next president. Y’all hold on and see if I’m not right.
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Attendance: Just a smidgeon over two hundred souls. ‘Course now it’s famous, everybody’s gonna claim they was at the game.
And I know you’ve heard this before on this blog, but I’ve just gotta say it one more time: The whole spectacle was paid for by you and me. Your education taxes at work.
… New Year’s poems. She’ll start with this one. It’s in the form of a New Year’s letter to a friend.
Modern poets bring a number of intriguing ideas and feelings to New Year’s. I’m not saying these ideas and feelings necessarily add up to what UD (consult her taste, at length, here) calls a great poem. But they tell you something about us, in 20… uh… 14.
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Letter to GC has the slangy fragmented musing down in the dumps thing characteristic of many of our time’s poems. Although it begins
I say most sincerely and desperately, HAPPY NEW YEAR!
it really has little to do with the turn of the year. No references to the weather, to the passage of time, to resolutions, to change, to renewal, to failure to renew, which tend to be the established New Year’s themes. Rather, the poem has to do with the poet’s familiar, year-round, right on the edge of psychological menace, unhappiness. She writes desperately and is in a desperate place:
Having rowed a little farther away from the cliff
Which is my kind of religion
Adrift in the darkness but readying oars
How can there be too many stars and hands, I ask you
She starts her letter to her friend with the precise coordinates of her mental instability as the year begins, the good news being that she finds herself, at this turning point, a little farther from falling off of a cliff than she has been. Yet so unstable is her condition that she has made a kind of religion of staying afloat despite her fragile “adrift in the darkness” reality.
She needs a lot of help: stars to guide her in the dark, and helping hands from other rowers on the same “wide water, without sound” on which Sunday Morning‘s riser perilously floats.
The rest of the poem will discuss a major modern malaise: self-consciousness. The Romantics could write things like
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time
but we’re too cool, too hip for (as Dana Levin writes in her penultimate line) the drama of feeling. These days, feeling itself is a problem – a personal problem, and therefore also an aesthetic problem. We can’t write Blakeian poems anymore, but we’re still subject to the same intense emotions as the Romantics. How, then, to write? How to convey our emotions verbally?
We can convey our events; we can say in poetry what happened.
We are getting such lovely flourishes from our poets
Fathomless opportunities for turning literacy into event
We have much more trouble conveying our true feelings. The poet can say at the beginning of the poem that she sincerely wishes CG a happy new year; but that’s Hallmark sincerity. What presents itself to the poet as a problem is expressing her personal, deep, and authentic feelings in her poetry.
I would be disingenuous if I said “being understood” were not important to me
Between the ceiling of private dream and the floor of public speech
So here she assumes the voice of someone like John Ashbery – not lyrical but discursive… Even rather absurdly self-consciously over-discursive (those quotation marks around being understood which dissolve the possibility of being understood even as they write being understood). And note the tortured negative, and the tortured subjunctive, feel of the line… We’re very far from sincere direct address. Yet where, between inexpressible obscurantism and inauthentic social chatter, can the poet locate the language of emotional authenticity?
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
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The imagination and its products so often rebuff purpose
And some of us don’t like it, and want to make it mean
I would never shoot you, even if you were the only meat around
This is the modern poet impatient with the obliqueness of the modern poem, the modern sensibility. She wants her poems to mean something, dammit, not just dance cleverly around things, the way she, in her religion, dances around that cliff. Why futz with fancy language no one’s going to understand? You wanna tell someone you love them, you say I love you so much that even if I were starving and you were meat I wouldn’t shoot you.
Humor… humor’s one way to go… A joke being, as Nietzsche said, an epigram on the death of a feeling …
Anyway, I empathize with your lower division semester (which sounds
kinda Dante, to me)
The poet commiserates with her professor friend’s upcoming teaching in a lower division (and as with the work of Charles Wright, she references Dante – true religion, if you will – in that skittish clever modern way she says she’s kinda trying to avoid); and she does confess, as her poem ends,
I want to be approved of, so much
Despite the image I’ve been savoring, the one of the self-stitching wound
Yes, I want to write that self-healing wound poem, the one with
cocoon closed up with thorns
It’d be great if she were, say, Andy Warhol; but actually she writes because she’s vulnerable and wants love and approval and understanding. She is very far from being a closed up cocoon.
So – a post-romantic lament at the turn of the year… These days, as she says… these special year-end days prompt thoughts of our current, particular, predicament.
… at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
Honoring Billy Joel.
(Click on the image
for a better view.)
Reflections on the modern American distillery.
And the tweets keep coming.
My Marketing class had a higher attendance than this Beef O’Bradys Bowl.
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If you watch the Beef O’Bradys bowl, look for me. Trust me you’ll be able to find me, there are 200 people in here.
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What can UD say? Your education tax dollars at work.
Dummies make the cutest commissioners.
Here’s a link to the New York Times story.
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And here’s a link (UD thanks Stephen) to where one of the people written about in the NYT piece seems to threaten to sue.
Well, at least Massachusetts taxpayers are also paying for a new law school the state doesn’t need. That’s some consolation.
