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HP's UNC-Cheat Thread - UNC comes out on top, NCAA penalized by UNC

"8. We were unable to discern a clear motive for establishing and offering these perverse andanomalous courses. The evidence is consistent with one hypothesis that these courses wereprovided for the primary purpose of enlarging the department’s enrollment, as a factor forincreasing its allotted faculty positions. As a generality, no one was paid extra for having morethan the normal number of these courses. There is no evidence that anyone outside of theDepartment office was active in its instigation and continuance. I believe personally that the bigmoney from television contracts does distort values of collegiate sports programs; but we foundno evidence that it was a factor in these anomalous courses. Despite what one might imagine,there is no evidence the Counselors, or the students, or the coaches had anything to do withperpetrating this abuse of the AFRI/AFAM curriculum, or any other."

So, the only suggested motive is that the Department Chair and his Administrative Assistant were interested in increasing enrollment/funding/faculty positions? I guess I buy that. To be honest, it is probably more likely than the supposition that they are really big sports fans.
 
Jay Smith says otherwise...

"I was the associate dean for undergraduate curricula between 2004 and 2008; I was in charge of the renumbering project to which he alludes. That project had nothing whatever to do with increasing course offerings. Its purpose was to broaden the range of numbers available for courses already in existence.

If Martin had wanted to know why Afri/Afam suffered a general decline in enrollments in 2007, he might have asked me. The department suffered from such notoriously bad management that it – alone among all departments in the College of Arts and Sciences – had neglected to submit most of its courses for consideration for the General Education curriculum. Consequently, students found Afri/Afam courses less attractive because they satisfied fewer requirements.

That the chair of the department could be so negligent, so inattentive to broad departmental interests in 2005-2006, of course directly contradicts Martin’s evidence-free speculation that the whole “paper” course scam reflected only his desire to boost departmental enrollments and win new faculty positions. The very idea that the chair would have hoped to draw attention to his own bloated enrollment figures, along with the fraudulent strategies that underlay them, runs against common sense."

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/12/21/2560082/the-many-maddening-failures-of.html#storylink=cpy
 
To whom did Dr. Julius _____ report? What was his salary? Anyone know? Strange that guy was allowed to run his department in that fashion, particularly if, as reported by davedc, such subpar management was unheard of in the College of Arts and Sciences.
 
Seems like Smith is the only one with any integrity at that place.
 
Makes Martin's conclusions seem pretty unfounded then. I still don't buy the "sports fan" theory though.
 
It's hard to imagine a scenario that this entire scheme wasn't cooked up primarily to help athletes, but this report seems to fail to make that connection.

At this point, I don't think anything they put in that report would result in additional NCAA penalties, so ultimately it probably doesn't matter. The NCAA clearly wants to be done with UNC.

Not really. The PC culture at UNC wasn't going to allow any oversight to AFAM.* They made a DEPARTMENT (on par with things like "Math", "English" and "History") out of an identity study, and then walked away to let it self-regulate (ask Jay Smith how that worked out). Athletics was more than happy to exploit a systemic flaw to its own benefit, but there has to be a sham department before it can offer easy classes. Horse, then cart.

* Even AFTER all of this came to light, what steps did they take against the Department Chair? A: Retirement with full benefits. Of course.
 
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Not really. The PC culture at UNC wasn't going to allow any oversight to AFAM.* They made a DEPARTMENT (on par with things like "Math", "English" and "History") out of an identity study, and then walked away to let it self-regulate (ask Jay Smith how that worked out). Athletics was more than happy to exploit a systemic flaw to its own benefit, but there has to be a sham department before it can offer easy classes. Horse, then cart.

* Even AFTER all of this came to light, what steps did they take against the Department Chair? A: Retirement with full benefits. Of course.

Agreed; that is on the school, not the athletic department.
 
The new Kane article is great. The former governor really tarnished any bit of integrity he had gained. What a sham of a "investigation"
 
Agreed; that is on the school, not the athletic department.

I'm pretty sure there's more to the athletic department's culpability than will ever be heard, but people who think that AFAM was put there by Butch Davis to get Marvin Austin a degree have absolutely no idea how UNC campus politics work. If somebody spent thirty minutes on campus, the myth of the puppet department would evaporate. The PC tail wags the once-reputable dog; violently.
 
The new Kane article is great. The former governor really tarnished any bit of integrity he had gained. What a sham of a "investigation"

I've corresponded with Kane personally. He's on a Grail Quest and he's pretty sure he's struck a vein of ore that will be a career builder for him. The thing is, the....shall we say more "emotionally invested" subsets of the paper's readership don't need any facts. He could run an article that says Butch Davis brushes his teeth left-handed and he'd get 10,000 mouth-breathing Wolfpackers screaming "See! See! I toldya!. They's cheatin' again!" Thirty years of manifest athletic irrelevance is a bitter pill to swallow, and they're eating this counternarrative up. The paper---desperate for clicks---is all too happy to oblige. This is year four of this story, and it's the first link on their standing banner, as of ten seconds ago.
 
oh, so you are completely full of shit on this topic as well?
 
oh, so you are completely full of shit on this topic as well?

If you understood the Roman calendar, you'd see the point.

Also, we shouldn't assume that there is a limit to things for which my insight dwarfs your own.
 
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I've corresponded with Kane personally. He's on a Grail Quest and he's pretty sure he's struck a vein of ore that will be a career builder for him. The thing is, the....shall we say more "emotionally invested" subsets of the paper's readership don't need any facts. He could run an article that says Butch Davis brushes his teeth left-handed and he'd get 10,000 mouth-breathing Wolfpackers screaming "See! See! I toldya!. They's cheatin' again!" Thirty years of manifest athletic irrelevance is a bitter pill to swallow, and they're eating this counternarrative up. The paper---desperate for clicks---is all too happy to oblige. This is year four of this story, and it's the first link on their standing banner, as of ten seconds ago.

The only problem with this is that the NCSU fans actually found the hard evidence about all of the wrong doings at UNC and bringing them to light when every other "journalist" in the state wouldn't touch it. It's not like Kane is making shit up, that would be UNC. Kane is just doing his job and giving the state the type of coverage a story like this deserves.
 
NC State fans and UNC fans have one thing in common - they both do and will continue to believe whatever they damn well want to believe based on this stuff.
 
Hey, HP, want to change the thread title to something like "Ongoing UNC corruption thread?"
 
Hopefully this will be reported somewhere other than the Daily Tarheel..Hope they get what they deserve.
 
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