Says here that the UNC-Chapel Hill has spent $467,000 on legal fees related to the NCAA investigation of its football program. Along the way, the investigation also turned up serious academic misconduct in the university’s African and Afro-American Studies Department, which the school and the State Bureau of Investigation continue to investigate.
Writing in the Raleigh News & Observer, Jay Schalin of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy argues that those investigations are too narrowly focused:
The UNC system has 16 universities, nearly 2,000 degree programs, over 16,000 faculty members and more than 220,000 students. Fifteen campuses have varsity basketball teams, and 12 have varsity football teams. While Chapel Hill’s administration and others have tried to paint the AFAM department as a single rogue program, the sheer size of the system suggests good odds that there are other substandard departments.
And even one more program like former department Chairman Julius Nyang’oro’s AFAM is too many. If the Chapel Hill administration, the system’s General Administration, and the Board of Governors were fast asleep on that one, what else are they missing?
It’s time for the system to seek out potential problems proactively rather than avoiding them until they accidentally make headlines. AFAM’s problems came to light only because a single tweet by a football player started an investigation that wound a slow, sordid path to the department’s door. No tweet, or nobody noticing the inappropriate behavior described in the tweet, and Nyang’oro would still be the department chair, giving out good grades for almost no work.
