Report: Advisors, Profs Created 18 Years of Academic Fraud at UNC

For 18 years, academic advisors at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pushed athletes to enroll in
“shadow courses” that never actually met and only required
participants to write an end-of-term paper—a paper that was never
graded or even read.

The latest report on the long-running con in UNC’s Department of
African and Afro-American Studies pins much of the blame on Deborah
Crowder, who managed the department until 2011. From the

News & Observer:

“Between 1993 and 2011, Crowder and Nyang’oro developed and ran
a ‘shadow curriculum’ within the AFAM Department that provided
students with academically flawed instruction through the offering
of ‘paper classes,’” the report said. “These were classes that
involved no interaction with a faculty member, required no class
attendance or course work other than a single paper, and resulted
in consistently high grades that Crowder awarded without reading
the papers or otherwise evaluating their true quality.”

Two counselors even suggested to Crowder what grades to give to
the athletes.

The report did not find significant fault with university or
athletic leadership. UNC President Tom Ross and Chancellor Carol
Folt expressed “disappointment” that some people in the campus
community knew about the scope of the problem but did nothing about
it for years.

The fact that this deception involved so many students and
advisors over so many years is staggering. One wonders whether the
athletic-industrial complex was particularly bad at UNC, or whether
similar frauds are ongoing at other public institutions of higher
learning.

The college bubble better hurry up and pop, huh?