Keeping the Athletic Graduation rate up at UNC,

[doubtingt]

Look, I'm not saying the AS/AAS department was righteous. A report that says they weren't righteous doesn't cause me any dissonance. The report, is fine, as far as it goes. It just doesn't go far enough. But if you think you got me, which you don't, and that make you feel like a big man, then feel like a big man.

You do that, you stick with that,

And I will know the truth. That no show classes are not new nor department specific at UNC. That nothing like this goes on for nearly two decades without at least tacit support from a whole lot of people, people who will never be mentioned in any report ever. That people don't want to think bad things about Tobacco Road so this too shall pass and business as usual will continue at UNC.

Until the citizens of the old North State, the TAX PAYING citizens of NC, demand not a pretty narrative of nothing but love for Tobacco Road, but a university that actually provides a world class education for EVERY student, nothing will change.

But things as changing. More people are catching on and are ready to make that demand.

Imagine a five story office building with a leaky roof. Every office on the fifth floor has a leak and everyone puts the trashcan under the leak. On the fourth floor, about half the offices have trashcan under a leak. Only a quarter of the third floor sees any water coming through the ceiling. By the time it reaches the second floor, every leak is caught in a trashcan. The building maintenance supervisor's office is on the first floor, and he never sees any water.

One day part of the roof caves in and it attracts a lot of attention. An building inspector is called in to figure out what happened. In the report, a couple people on the second floor are blamed for the collapse, because they kept emptying the trash can and never reported the leak. The maintenance supervisor is blameless, because how was he to know the roof was leaking?

Bad analogy to this case. This case is more like all the floors of many buildings were investigated. The AAS department deliberately cut a massive hole in their roof which wound up leaking down to the athletics department on the floor below them. Some people in the athletics department knew about the leak and did not report it and even encouraged students to take advantage of it. Other departments drilled tiny holes in their roofs (case by case grade inflation within legit courses), but nothing on the scale of the AAS and those small holes cannot be as easily identified as deliberate fraud when investigated. Thus, the AAS is blamed because they are by far the most to blame and are the instigators of the most massive and widespread academic fraud. All others are not completely innocent, but are not nearly as culpable. It is the extremity and the scale of the fraud by the AAS that is responsible for it being so provable, unlike the more widespread, minor and hard to prove fraud of giving an athlete a higher grade than they deserve in a course.

 

[Bronzeage]

Imagine a five story office building with a leaky roof. Every office on the fifth floor has a leak and everyone puts the trashcan under the leak. On the fourth floor, about half the offices have trashcan under a leak. Only a quarter of the third floor sees any water coming through the ceiling. By the time it reaches the second floor, every leak is caught in a trashcan. The building maintenance supervisor's office is on the first floor, and he never sees any water.

One day part of the roof caves in and it attracts a lot of attention. An building inspector is called in to figure out what happened. In the report, a couple people on the second floor are blamed for the collapse, because they kept emptying the trash can and never reported the leak. The maintenance supervisor is blameless, because how was he to know the roof was leaking?

Bad analogy to this case. This case is more like all the floors of many buildings were investigated. The AAS department deliberately cut a massive hole in their roof which wound up leaking down to the athletics department on the floor below them. Some people in the athletics department knew about the leak and did not report it and even encouraged students to take advantage of it. Other departments drilled tiny holes in their roofs (case by case grade inflation within legit courses), but nothing on the scale of the AAS and those small holes cannot be as easily identified as deliberate fraud when investigated. Thus, the AAS is blamed because they are by far the most to blame and are the instigators of the most massive and widespread academic fraud. All others are not completely innocent, but are not nearly as culpable. It is the extremity and the scale of the fraud by the AAS that is responsible for it being so provable, unlike the more widespread, minor and hard to prove fraud of giving an athlete a higher grade than they deserve in a course.

When the FBI investigates corporate fraud, they often encounter a scheme which runs through many layers of a hierarchy. What do you do with the people in the middle who fomented fraud, simply by being part of the culture and doing their job? The FBI has a hard and fast rule. If you benefited from the fraud, you are guilty of fraud.

It's not a bad analogy. It's a trashcan under the leaks culture which allows things like this scandal to prosper, year after year. They found a faculty member who got greedy and turned it into cash. That makes him as good a fall guy as anyone else. The rest are glad their head was down when the lawnmower came through. Now they have a report that puts the finger on a few people and gives a bill of good health to all the others who made the whole possible.

 

[doubtingt]

Bad analogy to this case. This case is more like all the floors of many buildings were investigated. The AAS department deliberately cut a massive hole in their roof which wound up leaking down to the athletics department on the floor below them. Some people in the athletics department knew about the leak and did not report it and even encouraged students to take advantage of it. Other departments drilled tiny holes in their roofs (case by case grade inflation within legit courses), but nothing on the scale of the AAS and those small holes cannot be as easily identified as deliberate fraud when investigated. Thus, the AAS is blamed because they are by far the most to blame and are the instigators of the most massive and widespread academic fraud. All others are not completely innocent, but are not nearly as culpable. It is the extremity and the scale of the fraud by the AAS that is responsible for it being so provable, unlike the more widespread, minor and hard to prove fraud of giving an athlete a higher grade than they deserve in a course.

When the FBI investigates corporate fraud, they often encounter a scheme which runs through many layers of a hierarchy. What do you do with the people in the middle who fomented fraud, simply by being part of the culture and doing their job? The FBI has a hard and fast rule. If you benefited from the fraud, you are guilty of fraud.

It's not a bad analogy. It's a trashcan under the leaks culture which allows things like this scandal to prosper, year after year. They found a faculty member who got greedy and turned it into cash. That makes him as good a fall guy as anyone else. The rest are glad their head was down when the lawnmower came through. Now they have a report that puts the finger on a few people and gives a bill of good health to all the others who made the whole possible.

He is not a "fall guy". He is not taking blame for anything but what he personally did and his punishment doesn't come close to being as severe as it should be based on his actions alone, no matter what others were doing. He is objectively more causally responsible for more extreme and blatant fraud than any other faculty. He didn't just profit off an existing system, he created his own system of fraud that went well beyond anything else that existed. The fact that a general desire for athletes to get good grades motivated others to look the other way doesn't reduce his culpability at all, it just means that he was able to get away with it for longer than he otherwise would have. He was not put forth to take the fall. The extremity of his crimes make him both the objectively most guilty individual (along with his assistant) and the most provably guilty. If many others had committed crimes as extreme as him, they'd be going down too, but they didn't, so they aren't.

A far better analogy than yours would be criminal that lives in a halfway house and whose criminal acts are far more extreme that other residents. But the other residents don't want to blow the whistle on him and neither do those running the house. His extreme criminality is given cover by their complicity, but he is the one that deserves the most punishment, and the others' guilty is likely hard to prove.

And the "culture" in question here is not merely that which surrounds student athletes. For the Nth time, non-athletes were more than half the students given free grades in these fake AAS courses. The students given the free grades were more categorizable by race than by being an athlete, and its no coincidence that this was allowed to go on for so long within an AAS department that like all AAS departments are rooted heavily in politically racial activism. The others that had to know the most and did nothing were those in the AAS department. Are the AAS faculty all just really huge Tar Heel fans, or is also about a corrupt culture of putting racial politics and social agendas before academic integrity?