James Dean, the executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, flew to New York, arriving at Bloomberg headquarters on Saturday to deliver a heartening message. He wanted to do it in person. “We made mistakes. Horrible things happened that I’m ashamed of,” he said over coffee in our newsroom, sparsely populated on a weekend. “Student-athletes and other students, too, were hurt” as a result of hundreds of phony classes offered beginning sometime in the 1990s. “The integrity of our university was badly damaged.”
Chapel Hill’s top executive for academics, its No. 2 official overall, came to New York to underscore that his fine university—a pillar of public education and a force in Division 1 sports—”hasn’t been clear enough about what went wrong.” He said he and his boss, Chancellor Carol Folt, are determined to change direction. “To fix things, we have to understand what actually happened in the past,” Dean added. He came to us because Bloomberg Businessweek has been examining the corruption of academics at Chapel Hill—although such problems are not unique to the school—as an illustration of how the drive to win lucrative college basketball and football championships undermines the education of undergraduates.
NCAA Inc. is a multibillion-dollar industry with tens of millions of avid customers—college sports fans. Holding UNC and the rest of the National Collegiate Athletic Association accountable, therefore, seems appropriate.
Dean, whose recent actions and public comments I’ve criticized as tending to obfuscate more than clarify, left little doubt in my mind that at least the message from Chapel Hill changed last week. Whether the rhetorical shift signals a deeper adjustment of actions and attitudes remains to be seen. Dean amplified comments made Thursday by Folt to the university’s board of trustees acknowledging “a failure in academic oversight for years” that was “wrong and…undermined our integrity and our reputation.” She added: “We actually do feel accountable and…we’re going to learn from that painful history.”
That painful history consists of the transformation of UNC’s former African and Afro-American Studies Department into a factory churning out fake grades from phony classes disproportionately attended by varsity athletes. No one is disputing that anymore. What’s still unclear is the degree to which Chapel Hill’s powerful Athletic Department initiated and/or exploited the fraudulent Afro-Am department. (It has since been reformed and “rebranded,” Dean pointed out, as African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies.)
In the most important piece of actual news he delivered during his visit to New York—news that as far as I can tell has not been reported anywhere else—Dean said he had commissioned an internal study on the entire history of African and African-American studies at UNC. He said he’s determined to get to the bottom of what forces and personalities caused the program’s ugly corruption. He also vowed to “look at” whether athletes were “clustering” in other departments and classes reputed to be the source of easy grades. If these inquiries are thorough and followed by changes, UNC could go from outlaw to leader in cleaning up the relationship between Division 1 “revenue sports,” as they’re known, and the provision of real undergraduate education.
Here are some of Dean’s other main points:
It didn’t happen on our watch. Folt and Dean assumed their positions just last summer. She came from Dartmouth; he had been the dean of UNC’s highly regarded business school. Eight campus officials tainted by the sports-academics scandal have either been fired or resigned under pressure, including Holden Thorp, Folt’s predecessor as chancellor, an athletic director, a varsity football coach, and the supervisor of the campus office that provides special tutoring to athletes. Also gone are the former long-time chairman of the counterfeit Afro-Am department, Julius Nyang’oro, and his administrative assistant. Nyang’oro was criminally indicted in December for defrauding UNC.
Until the last few days, the university’s leadership seemed intent on hanging all culpability around the necks of Nyang’oro and his aide. That made no sense: Why would a lone scholar have taken it upon himself to prop up athletes’ eligibility, and how could he have operated his scam for nearly two decades undetected? Now Dean and Folt are conceding that the story is more complicated and does have something to do with athletics.
That concession ought to bring NCAA investigators back to Chapel Hill. The sports association took a pass on probing the scandal, based on the notion that it didn’t have anything to do with athletes and therefore was outside the NCAA’s jurisdiction.
http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles ... eal-changeI like the stinky pinky but only up to the first knuckle, I do not want a GD thumb up there--I've told her multiple times and I always catch her when she tries to pull a fast one---it's my butthole for Chrissakes I'm gonna know--so cut out the BS.
