Two decades of shame

Editorial by Durham Herald-Sun, October 23, 2014.

A paragraph near the beginning of Kenneth Wainstein’s devastating report on academic fraud at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said far more than its few words about why the scandal is so disillusioning.

“Like many universities, the Chapel Hill administration took a loose, decentralized approach to management of its departments and department chairpersons, on the theory that strong management in the college environment unduly constrains the academic independence that fosters creative instruction and research,” Wainstein’s team wrote.

“As a result of this approach, the University failed to conduct any meaningful oversight of the AFAM Department and ASPSA (Academic Support Program for Student Athletes), and (Deborah) Crowder’s paper class scheme was allowed to operate within one of the nation’s premier academic institutions for almost two decades.” (Italics added)

For nearly 20 years – the lifetime of the last of the athletes and other students who benefited from a purposeful assault on academic integrity – a department chair and his administrative assistant ran a system of bogus classes, illegitimate grades and institutional deception.

It happened, not at some diploma mill or some college scrambling to make a reputation. It happened at the oldest public university in the country, the crown jewel of the state’s system of higher education.

Words fail. If you care about UNC, or about public trust in institutions of higher learning and about their relationship to big-time athletics, to read Wainstein’s painstaking detail is to be angry, dismayed and, finally, sickened.

The numbers are staggering.  Over the 18 years Deborah Crowder ran her scheme, some 3,100 students took her “paper classes.” Nearly half were athletes – and 21 percent of athletes at the school took at least one class. Only 2 percent of non-athletes did.

While the cancer was centered in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, it infected far more of the university. Advisers took advantage of the scheme to keep their charges, often academically under-prepared, under-motivated or both – eligible to help entertain fans in football fields and basketball arenas.

“It is this tension – the tension between academics and athletics – that partly explains how the academic irregularities came to be at Chapel Hill,” Wainstein notes.

Other faculty members knew of or suspected irregularities, and did nothing. “Beyond those University personnel who were aware of red flags about the AFAM classes, there were a larger number among the Chapel Hill faculty, administration and Athletics and ASPSA staff who knew that these were easy-grading classes with little rigor..,” the report said. “Several of those same people also made a conscious decision not to ask questions even though they had suspicions about the educational content of those classes.”

That institutional failure may be the most unsettling aspect of this episode.

 http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/editorials/x1154813398/Two-decades-of-shame