Rock, Scissors …
Compassion for students is often laudable. But like anything else it can be taken too far, way too far, as Deborah Crowder proved at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
For Ms. Crowder, a manager in the department of African and Afro-American studies, compassion for students meant offering bogus classes, handing out A’s and B’s like candy at Halloween, and, ultimately, tarnishing the reputation of a prestigious state institution.
Her exploits are at the heart of a damning report, released last week, about hundreds of sham courses that benefited football and basketball players and others at the university. The “paper” courses, offered from 1993 to 2011, required only that students submit one paper—no lectures, no reading, no exams. “No actual instruction,” as the report puts it.
In fact, there was not even contact with an actual faculty member, since the courses were created and run by Ms. Crowder, though she regularly signed her department chair’s name to paperwork.
The 136-page report is the latest on a scandal that was first reported in 2011. The document details an investigation that began in February and was headed by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor.
But how, you ask, could a sham “shadow curriculum” exist for nearly two decades—and serve more than 3,100 students—at one of the most respected public universities in the nation? The report says the university, like many, trusted academic units to police themselves, as the department of African and Afro-American studies had done until a new chairman, Julius E. Nyang’oro, took over, in 1992, and delegated “substantial authority” to Ms. Crowder.
The report says Ms. Crowder “believed it was her duty to lend a helping hand to struggling students, and in particular to that subset of student-athletes who came to campus without adequate academic preparation.”
Academic advisers for some sports steered athletes to the paper courses, but nonathletes signed up as well—according to the report, athletes made up just under half of those taking the courses over the years. The report concludes that a fairly small number of people knew definitively that the courses were fake, but notes that plenty of staff members—to say nothing of the more than 3,100 students—ought to have realized something was seriously amiss.
“I apologize first to the students who entrusted us with their education and took these courses,” said the university’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, in a written statement. The university will, among other things, “add faculty to a group that reviews student-athlete eligibility and progress toward degree” and discipline nine employees.
Fair Use, Revisited
College librarians spent last week parsing a federal appeals court’s ruling in a long-running copyright case in which three publishers sued Georgia State University over its library’s “e-reserves” system, which makes copyrighted material available to students under “fair use” guidelines. The university’s library won what appeared to be a big victory in a lower court in 2012, but now the appeals court has sent the case back to the lower court for reconsideration.
So did Georgia State come out on the losing end? Maybe not, experts said. It turns out that the appeals court’s instructions to the lower court include some significant victories for librarians. For instance, the ruling said that when making fair-use decisions, a judge should take into account whether the college in question is nonprofit—a good sign for most institutions. Still, anyone hoping for an easy fair-use litmus test will be disappointed.
Foreign Affairs
The debate over academic boycotts of Israel continues to simmer.
Last week the American Studies Association put out a press release clarifying details of the boycott it announced late last year: The boycott discourages cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, on grounds that they are inextricably linked with the Israeli government, but does not extend to individual scholars, who are welcome at the association’s annual meeting, next month in Los Angeles.
The association’s boycott, like those adopted by the Association for Asian American Studies and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, is intended to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Elsewhere
The Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University came under fire for withdrawing an invitation to Michel du Cille, a Washington Post photographer, because he had recently returned from photographing Ebola victims in Liberia. … Some 370,000 additional parents and graduate students could qualify for federal PLUS loans under rules released last week by the Education Department. … After members of the University of Oklahoma’s marching band took out full-page newspaper ads complaining about a band rule prohibiting “negative or degrading online or print posts against the organization,” as well as about the leadership of the band director, Justin Stolarik, President David L. Boren struck down the rule. Mr. Stolarik resigned several days later. … Students in Professor Diane Bunce’s chemistry course at the Catholic University of America will come to class on Halloween costumed as elements—and classmates will try to figure out which ones. In previous years a student dressed as a banana to represent potassium, while another came as a surfer, representing californium.
Here’s a Thought
An editorial that appeared a few days ago in The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s student newspaper, goes out on a limb: It calls for abolishing the Greek system at the college.
“Our Animal House reputation is well-earned,” the editorial says. “For many, Greek life takes precedence over academics. It is an investment (perhaps a risky one), a path to acceptance, friends, sex, drugs, love, and jobs.” The fraternity and sorority system, says the newspaper, amplifies students’ worst behavior. “It facilitates binge drinking and sexual assault. It perpetuates unequal, gendered power dynamics and institutionalizes arbitrary exclusivity. It divides students—the system as a whole separates freshmen from upperclassmen, men from women. Membership draws lines among friends.” Cheating abounds, the paper adds.
Fraternity and sorority leaders, the editorial acknowledges, have worked hard to fix problems from the inside. But the editors conclude that “our antiquated system cannot be reformed.”
“We want Dartmouth students to have full access to the predominant social scene the moment they step on campus, and we want social life to be accessible, without financial barriers, over a student’s four years at the college,” the newspaper says. “Change will not be easy. … However, we must look forward and consider what we as a community want Dartmouth to look like in the decades to come—the safety and security of our future students depends on it.”
