Professor among 4 fired in UNC academic fraud

[alp227]

Source: AP

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina's flagship public university is trying to fire a senior professor, accepted the resignation of another faculty member and dismissed an academic counselor for athletes for their roles in the fraud scandal that rocked the school, campus officials said Wednesday.

Steps to terminate University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill philosophy professor and former faculty leader Jeanette Boxill started on Oct. 22, the same day that a scathing report into the cheating scandal was released, campus Chancellor Carol Folt said in a statement. Boxill is appealing Folt's decision, information that was released after a lawsuit by The Associated Press and nine other media organizations.

North Carolina's public records law requires state agencies, including public universities, to make employee records available. That includes records regarding their dismissal, suspension, or demotion. UNC-Chapel Hill officials had said the disclosure wasn't required until after an employee has finished appealing the decision, a process that could take years.

The report by former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein found a pattern of fake classes, which allowed 3,100 athletes and other students to earn artificially high grades from 1993 to 2011. While the sham courses were solely in the African studies department, multiple people around campus knew of them or suspected something but said nothing, the report said.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/92c5bb84d4d74778b057997a069e1316/professor-among-4-fired-unc-academic-fraud

[SoapBox]

1. "Sports" shit is out of control at colleges.

[ReRe]

2. Evertything...

... is broken.

[Jackpine Radical]

9. Worse.

Everything has been looted with smash-and-grab tactics, and then vandalized.

[exboyfil]

3. I wish the accreditation organization

had held UNC's feet to the fire more than they did. That is the only thing in academics that has a dollar value to compete against NCAA.

[CharlesMartell]

4. Unfortunately this is not a sports scandal

This was an academic scandal to keep athletes eligible for competition. The facts coming to light now all show that that the corruption was in the faculty.

[CanonRay]

5. UNC should get the death penalty for sports from the NCAA

when the university is itself complicit in the cheating, what other choice is there?

[CharlesMartell]

7. The problem with that is

that the athletes involved have by now come and gone. One of the two principle coaches as well. UNC is in the process of firing some of the academics involved, but several have escaped with what appears to be no consequences.

[paleotn]

6. And those faculty did it all, every bit of it, just for the love...

...of Tarheel athletics. Nothing more. No pressure / incentives from Athletics or Admin. Why NC athletic leadership knew nothing....nothing about it, in their best Sgt. Shultz imitation.

And if you believe that, man have I got a deal for you.....

[Igel]

8. Boxhill was an ethics professor.

Gotta love irony.

And in this, I'm sure that an ethical argument can be made for what she did.


The other point that should be made is that UN-CH is where there was a literacy scandal a while back. A professor said that the athletes were not being kept to the proper standards. She administered reading tests to show that many athletes had to have been improperly admitted, many were receiving nearly impossible grades. She was vilified. "Athletes" has a racial and ethnic skew, so she was racist. She was disloyal. She was unethical.

One wonders what role Boxhill had in silencing her.

[alp227]

11. Mary Willingham? Well, her "research" was GARBAGE.

http://coachingthemind.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-truth-is-not-in-transcripts.html

In response to the CNN report, UNC contracted three experts in educational assessment to independently review Willingham’s data and determine whether her conclusions were sound. On April 11, UNC published the complete independent review, which revealed several instances of egregious misinterpretation on Willingham’s part. Most significantly, all three experts stressed that the assessment on which Willingham based her findings only measured vocabulary and, therefore, was not a valid measure of students’ overall reading levels. Furthermore, the experts’ statistical findings were exponentially different from Willingham’s. Whereas Willingham had reported nearly 70% of her sample scored below high school level, the independent reviewers found less than 7% earned vocabulary scores that low. In other words, Willingham’s calculation was inflated ten times beyond what the independent reviewers found.

[Posteritatis]

10. So it's a sports scandal, then. (nt)