academic fraud, Doyell link on page 44 Options

[Lee Corso]

is this the "everyone does it" excuse ?

Yes. Evidently "boys and girls together" = "toxic cocktail" over at unc.

Shame. Shame on you sir. Have you no conscience? No sense of decency?

That is pretty low. The school has already pissed on her grave. Nice re-piss.

[DevilDJ]

National? Not national....?

Sadistic Media Targeted "carolina Way," Whinges Ex-unc Chancellor

Pro tip for anyone trying to make sense of a scandal. If the person at the center of it starts claiming that "the media" are persecuting them, it's usually (though not always) a solid bet that they are patently full of shit. It's the equivalent of shooting the messenger and then claiming self-defense.

I'll leave you to decide what you make of the remarks by James Moeser, who was the chancellor of the University of North carolina from 2000 to 2008, reported in Chapel Hill Magazine:


I think [the media] has really put a target on the university, and they’ve treated The carolina Way in a very cynical fashion, trashing it, really, and indicating The carolina Way was always just a fiction, a façade we put in front of misbehavior. I really resent that. I think The carolina Way is genuine, I think it’s real. I’m really angry about the [media]. I think they target people, and they take pleasure in bringing people down. I think their real goal here was to remove banners from the Smith Center. The fact is The carolina Way goes back to Dean Smith, the idea of achieving excellence while maintaining the highest levels of ethics, fair play and playing within the rules. [They have] tried to tarnish something that is quite noble in its concept. It also does a great disservice to Eve Carson, who talked about The carolina Way in terms of caring more about others than one’s self, indeed to be selfless, even sacrificial.

Now, really. If there's anyone whose apple has been polished by the media more than the likes of Dean Smith please, point 'em out. If I recall, Sports Illustrated once dubbed him Sportsman of the Year for precisely the notion that he was "achieving excellence while maintaining the highest levels of ethics, fair play and playing within the rules." Or, to quote from that 1997 cover story on Smith: "[H]is teams won, his players graduated, the rules went unbroken. But we honor him as much as anything for his conscientiousness in pulling off that trifecta." Hardly sneering stuff, and probably representative of the tone of coverage when a person's running an apparently clean, consistently successful program. In a word, it is fair. And it's glowing steady coverage of the sort that made North carolina basketball perhaps the closest thing to America's national brand of college hoops. Media made that possible.

Likely Moeser had a different outlet in mind when he said media "take pleasure in bringing people down." I will vouch that it is true. Many reporters do enjoy taking people down. The qualifier on that is, they like taking down rogues, blackguards and sanctimonious blowhards who oversee Potemkin degree programs for athletes who never attend class and who do no schoolwork, as the News & Observer reported was the case under Moeser at unc. If pointing out such a sham meets your definition of tarnishing something "quite noble in its concept," then you either need to reassess your concept of tarnishment or you need to apply your noble concept as noble deed. Otherwise, take your medicine — and have the horse sense not to use a murdered student as a human shield against people who tell the public about academic fraud.

http://deadspin.com/sadistic-media-targete...x-unc-508575547

[DevilDJ]

He's baaa-aaack.....

Report omitted Crowder’s athletic ties

By Dan Kane

Last July, a special faculty report into the academic fraud at unc-Chapel Hill made waves by raising the possibility that athletes’ academic counselors steered them to bogus classes in the African Studies Department.

But cut from the report, days before its release, was a potential explanation of why a manager within that department would be involved.

“Although we may never know for certain, the involvement of Debbie Crowder seems to have been that of an athletics supporter who managed to use the system to ‘help’ players; she was extremely close to personnel in athletics,” earlier drafts of the report state.

The final version, released July 26, dropped that language for this: “Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from multiple interviews that a department staff member managed to use the system to help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and Afro-American Studies Department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly taught.”

At first, the authors, professors Steven Bachenheimer, Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Michael Gerhardt, couldn’t explain the change. But a request for emails and other correspondence related to the report showed when it happened and why: Faculty chairwoman Jan Boxill wanted it cut because it amounted to hearsay. She told the authors that other professors, whom she did not identify, raised that concern.

Boxill, a former academic counselor for athletes, sent an email to Chancellor Holden Thorp and others as the report was released. It mentioned “some slight edits on page 6,” which is where Crowder’s athletic ties had been recounted.

In an email message to The N&O, she said changes were made after comments from the Faculty Executive Committee, which she chaired.

The information about Crowder isn’t hearsay. The N&O had reported Crowder’s ties to the Athletic Department the previous month, and they were later acknowledged in an investigation led by former Gov. Jim Martin, who determined Crowder wasn’t specifically helping athletes. He had not interviewed her and provided little evidence to back his claim. Martin had received both versions of the faculty report.

Other unc records given to an accreditation commission looking into the fraud connect Crowder and athletes. The university’s initial investigation, covering a recent five-year period, found nine bogus classes that appeared to have been set up by Crowder. Athletes accounted for all but eight of the 56 students enrolled, including 31 football players and eight basketball players.

LINK

Gawd. The usual suspects. Jan Boxill and the ex guvna. Disgusting.

unc’s Holden Thorp steps out of the spotlight

Holden Thorp seems to be enjoying his farewell tour.

He played keyboard with a student band at Cat’s Cradle, the Carrboro rock club. He was given lifetime delegate status by the university’s employee association. He came up with a David Letterman-style top 10 list for his successor, Carol Folt, in which he offered this advice: “Eat at the K&W at least once a semester. Get the fried okra.”

Another tip to Folt was to watch “Friday Night Lights,” a TV drama that revolves around a football team. “As soon as possible,” he advised her.

Thorp is winding down his time as chancellor at unc-Chapel Hill, the university where he arrived as a freshman in 1982 after applying to only one school.

It wasn’t supposed to end this soon for the talented chemist and entrepreneur who rapidly ascended from professor to department chairman to dean and, in 2008, chancellor – at the tender age of 43.

In a recent interview, Thorp said he wished he had watched “Friday Night Lights” five years ago. An education about athletics would’ve come in handy.

After being consumed for more than two years with an athletic scandal that led to the revelation of a major academic scandal, Thorp is giving up his beloved carolina. He is resigning at the end of June to become provost – second-in-command – at Washington University in St. Louis.

Last month, he convened a panel of experts to come up with better ways to balance academics and athletics at the university. And at a recent faculty meeting, Thorp told professors he wouldn’t weigh in on the debate about a Thursday night football game this fall in Chapel Hill.

“There’s probably something from Shakespeare or classical Greek that describes what I’ve done by doing this panel and then leaving,” he said with a laugh. “It’s sort of like Obi-Wan Kenobi dying at the end of Star Wars and leaving Luke Skywalker to fight the rebellion by himself.”

Some critics, too

Thorp may be leaving the battlefield to others, but he’s also not afraid to lob a few grenades as he departs. He created a stir last month when he said college presidents have pressing demands and therefore should leave sports to athletic directors.

That was sacrilege to college athletics reformers who have said the only way to assure integrity is to have college presidents in charge.

Hodding Carter III, a unc professor of leadership and public policy and former Knight Foundation president, said Thorp knows as well as anyone that big-time college sports can take a leader down fast. “This booger is not an 800-pound gorilla; it is a Godzilla and if you don’t shoot the bastard right away, it will eat you alive,” he said.

But, he said, Thorp’s proposal is way off base. “You really have got to get control of it, but you don’t get control of it by letting the guy who raised Godzilla become the person who now is supposed to supervise Godzilla, and that’s what the athletic directors are, and the conference guys.”

Thorp knows his suggestion was, to say the least, provocative.

“Bill Friday’s ghost and Hodding Carter and all those people are ready to kill me,” he said, mentioning the late unc president and current faculty member, both of whom worked on reforms for the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. “They don’t admit that their presidential control idea didn’t work.”

It didn’t work in the case of Thorp, who said he took the job with no inkling about the athletics minefield ahead. Early in his tenure, he was worried about student safety after the murder of student body president Eve Carson and the mass shooting at Virginia Tech.

During his five years on the job, he would wrestle successfully with state budget cuts, town politics and issues for the university’s lowest-paid workers. He repeatedly mentions what he says are the central indicators of the university’s health: unc-CH has climbed from 16th to ninth nationally in federal research dollars, and undergraduate applications for admission jumped 43 percent. At the same time, private giving has been steady, even during a recession.

Still, Thorp was dogged by scandals, some with seeds planted before he took over as chancellor. The trouble came in waves: improper benefits for football players, academic misconduct involving a tutor, academic fraud in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. The revelations came as a shock to the Tar Heel faithful, who liked to think they did things the right way, “the carolina Way.”

He fired football coach Butch Davis, prompting anger from some fans and derision from others who said the action came too late.

Layers of investigations were launched, by the NCAA, the State Bureau of Investigation, a Board of Governors panel, a review by former Gov. Jim Martin and more recently, the university’s accrediting body.

Lessons in PR

There were other problems, too. The university’s top fundraiser resigned after spending university money on trips with his girlfriend, the mother of a former unc basketball star, in some cases to see her sons play. Thorp had approved an arrangement where the office of the fundraiser, Matt Kupec, was paying for Tami Hansbrough’s job, even though she was working in a different department. Thorp announced his resignation soon after the news broke.

This year, several women filed a federal complaint accusing the university of mishandling sexual assault cases. That has led to campus protests, the hiring of a consultant and two federal investigations.

Too often, Thorp said, he found himself in front of microphones trying to explain the problems and pledging to fix them.

Looking back, he said he would have done some things differently when it came to public communication and crisis management.

“But it’s always easy to see those things at the end,” he said. “It’s really hard when you’re going through it. It’s real easy to look at somebody else’s crisis and know what to do. It’s a whole different deal when you have a big bureaucratic organization, trying to make quick decisions and getting people on board.”

The academic scandal in the African studies department was perhaps the most embarrassing blow, with no-show classes, poorly supervised independent study courses and unauthorized grade changes. Martin’s probe found more than 200 irregular courses going back to the mid-1990s.

The blame was pinned on a former department chairman, Julius Nyang’oro and a manager, Debbie Crowder, who had close personal ties to the athletics department. Neither works at the university now.

One good result, Thorp said, is that a myth has been deconstructed.

“It was a failure of lots of people over a lot of years to detect it,” he said of the academic scandal. “I think that was fueled by this notion that these kinds of things didn’t happen here.”

Still, though, he resists the notion that the African studies scandal originated with athletics.

“I don’t think we have any evidence to suggest that this whole scheme was devised specifically for athletes,” he said. “But I don’t want to be the slightest bit defensive about the fact that student-athletes certainly took advantage of it and they had lots of ways to know about it.

“The personal relationships that Debbie Crowder had were very conspicuous ways in which they would have (known about it). Does that make it an athletic scandal or an academic scandal? I don’t know.”

The intense public interest surely revolved around athletics. If no athletes had been enrolled in the fake classes, he asserted, no one would have taken much notice.

“And that part is sad,” he said, “because it would have been just as bad a thing.”

Support from students, staff

Thorp said the panel he appointed will come out with recommendations sometime this fall. Meanwhile, dozens of policies and procedures are in place on both the academic and athletic sides of the university to prevent a recurrence.

There have been numerous personnel changes, too, and Thorp said he has faith in Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director, and Larry Fedora, the football coach.

“We didn’t have an elegant way of getting there, but it’s all pretty good now,” he said. “I’m proud of all that, and it was an honor to do it, but I’m ready to take a break.”

When Thorp decided in September to step down, he said he had done a lot of thinking about whether he was the right kind of leader for that moment in the university’s history. In July, he had been to the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, where he learned about his strengths and weaknesses.

Thorp said those who chose him to be chancellor obviously couldn’t have foreseen that the young leader would have to deal with an athletics meltdown. They had no way of knowing “that we were going to need somebody who had a full tank of gas for going on TV and talking to the media and dealing with a crisis.”

He really didn’t want to be a politician or a public figure. He was more focused on the internal workings of the university.

When public scrutiny and criticism were at a fever pitch last fall, faculty, staff and students were at rallies begging Thorp to stay. In the central quad, they rolled out long scrolls, where they wrote messages of praise.

James Holman, on the housekeeping staff, sent a letter thanking Thorp for working to solve the staff’s long-standing issues and working conditions. Thorp was credited with raising minimum salaries and starting a community garden for workers.

“It has been decades since the university has had a chancellor with the gift of being able to listen and to hear, as well as the determination to act,” Holman wrote.

Working the inside

Thorp said he hopes history will judge him as someone who did his best to take care of the people in the university community.

“There’s a lot of commentary about whether I should have done things differently when it comes to taking care of the outside,” he said. “But I know how to take care of the inside of a university.”

Many say Thorp did well at building good relationships with faculty, employees and students, keeping an open door to people.

“On those people and caring issues, he really gave more time than most chancellors,” said Dan Gitterman, a professor of public policy. At the same time, Gitterman said, Thorp did not have an adequate support system of senior advisers who could help with some of the big issues that became overwhelming – athletics and the recent investigation into the university’s handling of sexual assault cases.

“Those are things you need people right in your office who can help give you advice on,” Gitterman said. “Those are big, big operations and he was home alone.”

In St. Louis, where Thorp jokes the winters are colder and the summers are hotter, he won’t have to deal with big-time athletics and its pitfalls at the NCAA Division III school.

As provost, he will oversee the academic enterprise, while his new boss, Chancellor Mark Wrighton, will be in the spotlight. Thorp said he looks forward to putting more emphasis on graduate students at WashU, a respected research university that has built strong undergraduate programs.

At 48, he has time to settle into the second-in-command role. He said he had two other job opportunities, but he won’t discuss them.

Though he had announced his intention to stay on the chemistry faculty at unc-CH, it seemed a good time to make a change, he said. Both of the Thorp children are leaving home in the fall – daughter Emma to a boarding school in Virginia, and son John to unc-CH.

So Thorp won’t be away from Chapel Hill for long. He’ll be back in late summer as a carolina parent when his son goes through freshman orientation.

In the Midwest, he and his wife, Patti – known as an exuberant basketball fan – will root for the Bears. And, Thorp said, they might squeeze in a road trip or two to catch another team.

“I can’t wait to go to Louisville and South Bend and watch the Tar Heels play. That’ll be great.”

LINK

Congrats , Holden. You're the first hole to get within sniffin' distance of admitting what everyone else already knows. It was , indeed , an ATHLETIC scandal too.

[Dread]

God bless Dan Kane.

[Pookie]

Is it over?

[DevilDJ]

Why am I not surprised the name Jan Boxill appears right in the middle of this? This ain't new but she's the one who praised Admissions Director Stephen Farmer during this shetstorm....

unc faculty report on academic fraud also praises admissions director

The issue, as the report said, appeared to be the fact that Admissions Director Stephen Farmer had yet to reject a recommendation by a special advisory committee that reviews such athletes for potential admission

Jan Boxill, chairwoman of the Faculty Senate Council at unc-CH, later contacted us and said that issue is a minor one, because the special advisory committee is made up of faculty members who are concerned about academics. The issue, she and authors of the report said, pales in comparison to the good work Farmer has done to ensure that athletes who have little chance of surviving the academic load at the university do not get admitted.

The report points out such efforts: "According to Stephen Farmer, his office and the Athletics Department have increased efforts to discourage teams from presenting candidates that represent exceptionally high risks in terms of their ability to succeed academically at unc. There is evidence that these efforts are working. In addition his office is accumulating data on the academic performance of admitted students so that looking forward, they will have an approved basis for assessing and managing risk."

LINK

There's more but ya get the idea. Teaches courses in "Ethics" too.

[DevilDJ]

Not new but Kane picked up the Moesser "whinge..."

Ex-chancellor Moeser criticizes coverage of unc scandal

In an interview with a local magazine published last week, former unc-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser complained that media coverage of an academic scandal that involved many unc athletes was more about taking down championship banners than getting at what went wrong.

“I’m really angry about [the media],” Moeser told the Chapel Hill Magazine, a lifestyle publication. “I think they target people, and they take pleasure in bringing people down. I think their real goal here was to remove banners from the Smith Center.”

The remarks were part of a short article in which Moeser defended “The carolina Way.” That’s the title of a book written by revered men’s basketball coach Dean Smith, who retired in 1997, in which he offers his lessons for achieving success through hard work and strong ethics. It’s become a motto for the university, and it has taken a beating amid the academic and athletic scandals at the university over the past three years.

Those scandals include an NCAA investigation into the football team that found improper financial benefits for top players and improper academic and financial help from a tutor, and an academic fraud scandal that involves more than 200 lecture-style classes that never met and were heavily populated by athletes.

unc’s football team has never won a national championship, but its men’s basketball team, which plays in the Smith Center, won two championships during the roughly 14 years of no-show classes within the African and Afro-American studies department. Records show men’s basketball players were enrolled in the classes, including two that had one basketball player as the sole enrollee.

The university has not given a full accounting of football and men’s basketball enrollments in all the classes, but has insisted it was not an athletic scandal because nonathletes were enrolled and received the same good-to-excellent grades.

“I think [the media] has really put a target on the university,” Moeser told the magazine, “and they’ve treated The carolina Way in a very cynical fashion, trashing it, really, and indicating The carolina Way was always just a fiction, a façade we put in front of misbehavior. I really resent that. I think The carolina Way is genuine, I think it’s real.”

Moeser, who was chancellor from 2000 to 2008, could not be reached for comment.

John Drescher, executive editor of The News & Observer and a unc-CH alumnus, disputed Moeser’s take on the media coverage.

“We weren’t trying to get anybody,” Drescher said, “but we were trying to get to the bottom of what happened at unc. Most of our readers understood that and appreciate the digging we did.”

Moeser’s comments drew national attention when they were picked up by Deadspin, an irreverent online sports publication best known for exposing Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o’s fictious girlfriend. But the magazine criticized Moeser for “shooting the messenger.”

Closer to home, John Robinson, the former editor of The (Greensboro) News & Record, wrote in his blog, “Media disrupted,” that Moeser doesn’t understand the media’s job in an open society.

“What actually has happened is that the N&O discovered some rot in the internal workings at unc in athletics and academia and, like an infection in the body, you have to keep going after it to get rid of it all,” Robinson wrote. “That’s what the N&O has done and is still doing.”

Some faculty at the university said Moeser’s remarks were misguided. Michael Hunt, a history professor emeritus, said Moeser may be reacting to the criticism leveled by rival fans.

“He may be reflecting the embattled feeling that the administrators are feeling,” Hunt said. “The problem is they are dragging this out, and I don’t think anybody is saying -- I haven’t heard a word saying -- ‘Oh, the N&O’s persecuting Chapel Hill.’ Nobody is saying that except for the people who are trying to keep the lid on.”

LINK

Robinson's blog...

James Moeser and the importance of media literacy

Last September, Dan Gillmor wrote an essay on journalism education that should be read by everyone in higher education. He included this prescription:

“Persuade the president (or chancellor, or whatever the title) and trustees of the university that every student on the campus should learn journalism principles and skills before graduating, preferably during freshman year.” (Bold is mine.)

Former unc Chancellor James Moeser could have used such a course. What he said to Chapel Hill Magazine suggests that he doesn’t understand what the news media do.

“I think [the media] has really put a target on the university, and they’ve treated The carolina Way in a very cynical fashion, trashing it, really, and indicating The carolina Way was always just a fiction, a façade we put in front of misbehavior. I really resent that. I think The carolina Way is genuine, I think it’s real. I’m really angry about the [media]. I think they target people, and they take pleasure in bringing people down.” (Hat tip to Deadspin.)

It’s unclear what specific news organization he’s damning. (He may have been specific in his statement, but the magazine paraphrased it to the vague and nearly meaningless “media.”) . But “media” refers to everything from The New York Times to FoxNews to TMZ to blogs, and some of those likely target people and take pleasure in bringing them down.

But it’s probable that he was thinking about the News & Observer, which has been tenacious in its reporting on the scandals at the university. But it neither targets people nor takes pleasure in bringing them down. (For the record, I worked for the N&O in the 1970s and still know people there.)

What actually has happened is that the N&O discovered some rot in the internal workings at unc in athletics and academia and, like an infection in the body, you have to keep going after it to get rid of it all. That’s what the N&O has done and is still doing. There is a perception that the stories just keep coming, like a faucet dripping throughout the night. That’s because stories don’t come out fully baked. This isn’t a television program that ends at the top of the hour with a bow on top. Instead, reporters don’t know where the story is going to lead; they ask questions and try to follow the answers to get at the truth.

Officials operate with a different M.O. In this case, I believe that they want to get to the truth, but they also want to protect the institution and, often times, themselves. They operate under a different time schedule than the news media. They conduct investigations, appoint task forces, decline to comment. As a result, reporters write what they know when they know it. Stories are almost always incomplete. One story leads to another; more questions occur; more sources come forth; more records are found. Drip, drip, drip.

Through it all, newspapers do their damnedest to follow these principles.

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.

2. Its first loyalty is to citizens.

3. Its essence is a discipline of verification.

4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.

5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.

Best I can tell from reading the coverage for two years, that’s exactly what the News & Observer has done. I understood the media landscape well enough, too, last fall when I told my classes that then-Chancellor Holden Thorp’s tenure was about to end. That was three days before he announced his resignation. It’s the rare public official who can survive the drip-drip-drip of stories that embarrass the institution.

As an editor, I heard from people every week who were angry at something we did. Occasionally, they were right, but most of the time, their complaints demonstrated to me that there was little understanding about what journalists do and why. Consequently, they blamed the media for publicizing stories they didn’t want publicized. I understand loyalty to your institution; I’m showing it here. I also understand listening to facts…and trying to get to the bottom of problems.

Are there similar issues at other schools? Possibly. Should the news media investigate wrongdoing at them? Absolutely. But it is worth noting that the very slogan Moeser cites – “The carolina Way – reflects “the spirit of this University—excellence with integrity and heart.” It is a goal toward which the university always strives. And which the news media are helping achieve, whether or not the institution believes it.

Back to Gillmor’s prescription at the beginning of this post. Media literacy is a vital skill today when mass media is so omnipresent and influential. Understanding how the news media works and doesn’t work should be a core competency for everyone. Had Moeser taken my 100-level mass media class at his former institution he would have learned something.

LINK

[Dread]

“That’s what the N&O has done and is still doing.”

Oh yes. More to come. Much, much more.

[DevilDJ]

Mark Twain is STILL right.

[Pookie]

jesus what a bytch slap that was.

Friday?

[rachelix]

Mark Twain is STILL right.

P T Barnum?

[Dread]

Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please. ~Mark Twain