Last month a grand jury in Orange County, N.C., indicted Julius Nyang’oro for defrauding UNC by accepting payment for teaching a no-show course on “blacks in North Carolina.” The 19 students in AFAM 280 were current or former members of the Tar Heels football team, allegedly steered to the phantom class by academic advisers who sought to help elite athletes maintain high enough grades to remain eligible for competition. AFAM 280 was one of dozens of courses offered by North Carolina’s African & Afro-American Studies Department, formerly chaired by Nyang’oro, that never actually met, according to investigators. Known for rigorous academics, North Carolina allegedly operated a Potemkin department since the late 1990s.
Ouch.
Also:
Willingham also said the tutoring program routinely used the no-show classes in the African studies department to keep athletes eligible to play sports. Investigations led or backed by UNC have found more than 200 confirmed or suspected no-show classes since the mid-1990s, with athletes accounting for nearly half of the enrollment
So does this mean that
all of the no-show classes were in the "Afro-American" department? If so, let me say that I am not surprised in the least bit. Outside of a handful of AA studies departments (Cornell's and Princeton's come to mind) a lot of those departments are not taken seriously in the least bit by those universities running them nor by many of the students who take them because they are often taken because they are required "diversity" and "anti-sexism" courses and seen as easy A's.
