UNC Pimping Illiterate Student Athletes for 20 Years

Administrators at the University of North Carolina have become caught up in a jaw-dropping scandal involving a set up where illiterate student-athletes took sham courses for 20 years.  And  we the public are supposed to believe that the only culprits were two sleazy characters running the school's African American Studies Program.   According to NPR:

 The 131-page report centers on two people in the school's Department of African and Afro-American Studies: former Student Services Manager Deborah Crowder and Dr. Julius Nyang'oro, who became chairman of curriculum for the department known as AFAM in 1992.

They were clearly not the only ones involved in this scandal.  As an African historian, I am even more incensed that UNC chose my discipline to play around with.  And I direct most of my anger not so much at the morally corrupt peons in the program who carried out the charade, but the University administrators who allowed it to happen. In one fell swoop they have not only maligned themselves, their athletes, anyone who ever took courses in that shady department, but the disciplines of African and African-American Studies as well.  

This scandal has therefore become about more than sports, and greed. It has become a racist plot on the part of University officials to mock an entire field of study.  People like myself devoted so much of our student years engaged in campus activism aimed at pressuring universities to accept the validity of African and African-American Studies within the academic canon.   The same can be said for Women's Studies, Native American Studies, Latino Studies, Gender Studies and other courses that repudiated the false narrative that everything of value was created by white males. 

Finding a couple of handkerchef-head Uncle Toms to run such a sham department was probably not too expensive.  Whatever the cost, it was clearly a whole lot cheaper than teaching illiterate student athletes how to read.    

As for whether the latest report "whitewashed" the scandal to protect the UNC administrators, Forbes offers an insightful commentary. (click here)