UNC’s Systemic Fraud Was A “Typo.” Shameless!

By Professor Doom

     The academic fraud at UNC was intergenerational: it went on long enough that a participant in the early days of the fraud could see his child grow up, come to this university, and also participate in the fraud.

In one exchange, regarding a basketball player, Crowder asked Boxill if a "D will do."

“I’m only asking,” Crowder wrote, “because 1. No sources. 2, it has absolutely nothing to do with the assignments for the class and 3. It seems to be a recycled paper.”

"Yes," Boxill replied, "a D will be fine; that’s all she needs."

--I too have been on a campus where you had to ask permission if you wanted to fail a student, and I’ve covered many other faculty who’ve said the same. I maintain my claim that UNC is not alone here…

     For latecomers, a quick summary of the fraud: UNC had institutionalized “paper courses” running out of the African Studies department. All a student needed to do was submit a paper, any paper (not even written by the student), and the student would get a passing grade, with “A” being pretty common.

     There are several reasons the “fake classes” went on so long. Primary was because Admin has complete power: every whistleblower found himself out of a job and career ruined (a specific shout out to Mary Willingham, who received a 6 figure settlement for being punished for whistleblowing). Since it was an academic fraud, their accreditor, SACS, should have found it in their many “accreditation reviews” over the intergenerational fraud, but the same admin who run UNC also have a guiding hand in SACS: SACS policies make it impossible to detect even the most egregious fraud, even when the whistleblower provides documentation, and SACs allows the universities to perform all self-reviews, self-affirming their own legitimacy. Because the fraud was so blatant, so widely known, there were investigations, but admin squelched them regularly.

      Eventually there was so much evidence that it was no longer possible to cover up the fraud going on there, and, finally, UNC admitted to fraud. The accreditor stepped in, and levied the biggest penalty it could: pay raises were granted to administrators, for their failure to cover up the fraud. Yes, that’s the penalty. I’m putting some spin on that interpretation but bottom line, UNC didn’t have to pay a price for their academic fraud. The admin there just had to submit some paperwork showing that they investigated themselves, and were satisfied they weren’t committing fraud anymore. SACS accepted UNC’s self-investigation, as always, and then admin gave themselves pay raises and bonuses for doing the paperwork covering up the fraud…these guys just can’t lose.

      So, no penalty for the academic fraud which UNC admitted to, and lost court cases to whistleblowers trying to stop it.

     What of the NCAA? Our college athletes are supposed to be students as well, supposed to be getting a college education in exchange for sacrificing themselves at sportsball. The NCAA exists to protect those students and see to it they’re getting a fair shake (stop laughing!). It’s also supposed to make sure everything is fair (stop laughing!), and if one school is putting the athletes in fake classes, that’s not fair to the other schools, who are assuredly working hard to make sure their student athletes are getting a legitimate education (stop laughing!). I concede it’s hard to do this with a straight face but I’m trying to take the NCAA at their word, here (stop laughing!).

     So, the NCAA should take issue with UNC’s open fraud. The UNC defended itself from the NCAA:

The university aggressively fought the NCAA's efforts to assert its authority in this case, spending roughly $18 million on legal and other fees.

      I really want the gentle reader to put things in perspective here. UNC is a state school. Your tax dollars went to support an intergenerational fraud, a fraud which no administrator lost her job over….not even one, although quite a few got pay raises and bonuses for covering it up.

      Your tax dollars also went to defend this school from the consequences of that fraud, to the tune of $18 million, raising tuition all the while.

     Classes at this school have hundreds of students in them, and are taught by sub-minimum wage adjuncts, because the taxpayers just aren’t contributing enough money to pay a decent wages to the teachers.

       But UNC has millions of dollars available, your tax dollars, when it comes time to defend themselves from their own fraud. If you think the purpose of the university is to have sportsball, it was money well spent:

But after a three-and-half-year investigation, and despite the institution even agreeing that it had engaged in academic fraud, the NCAA said it couldn’t definitively conclude that the “paper courses” in the department of African and Afro-American studies had been designed and offered as an effort to benefit athletes alone. Thus, according to the NCAA's Committee on Infractions, which adjudicates allegations of wrongdoing, they did not violate the group's rules.

     Wow, a written confession and hundreds of pages of evidence still isn’t enough to “definitively conclude” anything here. It’s demented how admin’s failure to cover up the fraud actually helped them.

     See, these paper classes, when they started up nigh 20 years ago, were intended just for athletes; it was supposed to be hush-hush, just a single student in each class, all “taught” by a compliant professor who’d keep her mouth shut. That was the plan, and with a single-student-per-class setup, it should have worked. But the fraud went on for so long that word got out; thousands of students, about half of them not athletes, were now partaking in the fraud.

      And because of admin’s failure to keep the fraudulent system private, it was ruled the system was not “an effort to benefit athletes alone,” and so the NCAA sees no need to intervene.

"The panel is troubled by UNC's shifting positions ... depending on the audience," the report states.

      Yeah, those shifting positions are pretty shameless. SACS looks the other way on this fraud because they decided it was mostly about athletes (that’s what UNC told them, after all) and so not SACS’ concern. The NCAA looks the other way on this fraud because they decided it was mostly about students (that’s what UNC told them, after all), and so it’s not the NCAA’s concern.

     The fact that the fraud was widespread saved UNC. I can’t make this stuff up.

      But it’s fraud, right, UNC even admitted to it, finally, right? Not so fast. Turns out UNC’s written admission of fraud was a typo.

 “…the panel notes that the university contended that its use of the phrase "academic fraud" was a typographical error.”

     Whoa. UNC is claiming that their lawyers accidentally typed out a confession to “academic fraud” in their confession of academic fraud, in response to a 100+ page report exhaustively detailing the academic fraud. That is one gold-plated HECK of a typo.

     You want to bet no lawyer will be fired over this “typo”? And the NCAA bought this ridiculous story?

     You betcha.

     How do these suit-wearing admin manage to sleep at night while supporting such obvious lies? How do they handle the incredible headaches from holding the cognitive dissonance of lies of this magnitude in their minds? I guess I’ll leave such questions to the philosophers, but I do want to highlight some choice comments from normal decent people (i.e., people who could never work as a college administrator or for the NCAA):

The NCAA gives the green light to "colleges" creating fake courses for athletes, so long as:

1) The "college" claims they aren't fake; and

2) the athletes get enough of their girl friends to enroll so that the majority of "students" aren't athletes

     This is a major point. Both accreditor and the NCAA have said this level of fraud is perfectly acceptable, and accepted UNC’s contradictory claims that the fraud was simultaneously exclusively for athletes and not exclusively for athletes. The gentle reader had better believe that administrators at other universities are taking notes, and realizing that even a slight patina of integrity at their schools is completely unnecessary.

It is like a dirty cop not even stepping out of the street to accept his payoff or a bank robber not even bothering to put on a mask before entering the bank. The corruption is right out in the open and they don't punish it.

     Another important detail to highlight: this corruption was wide open. Thousands of students partook. Many faculty knew about it, but were helpless to stop it. Every administrator had to know, despite their denials; there’s a nice racketeering case here if the Feds ever decide to pursue it. Granted, if they did so, UNC would be spending infinite taxpayer dollars to defend themselves from the infinite taxpayer dollars the government could spend to prosecute them, so I reckon I can see why this open racketeering is tolerated.

     Of course, the UNC would be getting a big chunk of its money for lawyers from the student loan scam…maybe we could get rid of that, and then we’ll see an iota of justice here?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

UNC Fraud Penalty (Nothing) Paid In Full

By Professor Doom

     With all the Progressive silliness on campus today, it’s easy to miss a big underlying cause: a broken accreditation system.

     For newcomers, a quick primer on accreditation:

      Scholars came together to share information, and these gatherings turned into universities, with a mission of education: either humanity (by researching new knowledge) or of humans (by the teaching of that knowledge). As these institutions became formalized, scholars met with other institutions to learn from each other on how best to run a university. These meetings became established in the US in the 19^th century, a time when travel and communication weren’t nearly so trivial as today; it’s why we have regional accreditation, despite the fact that this is an outdated monopoly system (if “Bob’s SKool of Degree Grantin’ “ opened up across the street from Harvard, it would be every bit as legitimate as Harvard, since both have the same accreditor).

    Accreditation was intended to be a good faith system for universities interested in improving themselves. The whole accreditation system is based on good faith, and so institutions always self-report their own legitimacy. When there was no money involved, and accreditation was voluntary, this was fine, but the student loan scam only provides money to accredited schools…and accreditation was never designed to deal with the inevitable corruption that comes with billions of dollars.

      UNC really highlighted how broken accreditation is. UNC, for nearly 20 years, ran wholesale fake courses in their African Studies Department; time and again faculty complained about the fraud, but UNC administrators investigated themselves and cleared themselves of wrongdoing, time and again. After so many years and thousands of students, the evidence was overwhelming to the point that the accreditor finally noticed.

      The penalty? 1 year of probation where UNC would have to stop committing fraud. Additionally, UNC would have to prove to UNC that UNC was no longer committing fraud, and then UNC would report to the accreditor that it had investigated itself, and shown it wasn’t committing fraud anymore. And, that 1 year is up. All that unpleasantness is just a distant memory now.

       Seriously, we really need to re-examine whether the assumption of good faith in accreditation is such a good idea, and whether the lack of penalties for violation of accreditation really makes sense with billions of dollars on the line. Part of the reason why UNC’s penalty for 20 years of fraud where they actively lied to accreditors time and time again was so light is because accreditation doesn’t stipulate any penalties—good faith, you see, why should there be penalties when the institution means well, right?

      I’ve been at a fake school where acts of academic fraud were an everyday occurrence. I honestly thought the school was defrauding accreditation but…the way how accrediting rules are written, the school can do whatever it wants as long as admin says it means well. It’s nuts.

      Anyway, after the systematic pattern of fraud was simply too well documented to deny, SACS (the accreditor) finally took action:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will not lose accreditation over the academic fraud that occurred there, but it will face one year of probation, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges announced Thursday. In October, the university released a detailed report about widespread and long-lasting academic fraud at the university. For 20 years, some employees at the university knowingly steered about 1,500 athletes toward no-show courses that never met and were not taught by any faculty members, and in which the only work required was a single research paper that received a high grade no matter the content.

--one of the many lies admin told, and passed on here, was that the fraud only affected athletes…or didn’t affect athletes, as admin changed their tune depending on what spin they thought might work best. In any event, over 3000 students, many non-athletes, took these fake courses.

          With punishment meted out at long last, admin gladly accepted this “huge” penalty:

"The commission’s decision is the next step -- an expected consequence -- in Carolina’s tireless efforts to ensure integrity in everything we do and that the past irregularities are not allowed to recur," Carol Folt, UNC's chancellor, said in a statement.

      Hey, Carol’s title isn’t twice as long as her name…good for her. Still, I have to laugh at the “tireless efforts” phrase. Admin worked tirelessly to cover up this fraud, destroying the careers of whistleblowers and flat out lying in writing to SACS repeatedly. I really feel the need to point out that not a single administrator lost their job over facilitating this fraud…not even one. Tireless, they say.

       The complete lack of firings is a detail that requires some reading between the lines. The gentle reader should understand that a fired administrator would have nothing to lose by testifying against UNC, perhaps even providing evidence and a detailed account of exactly how deep the fraud went, or is still ongoing.

      So, yes, the complete lack of firings is strong evidence of deep systematic corruption at UNC, corruption that, since all the same administrators are there, could easily still exist. But I’m sure good faith will be enough to protect from that.

       As an added bonus, more administrators were hired to deal with the probation, with documenting that UNC wasn’t doing wrong any more. It’s a substantial document:

In January, UNC submitted a 200-page report to the accrediting body detailing the steps it has taken since the scandal came to light. The university will have to submit a similar update after the probationary period.

      So, they have to write a page a day, more or less. They probably opened up a whole new fiefdom with at least half a dozen vice presidents, each paid 6 figures a year…to write a page a day. I do so love sites that allow comments, so that readers can give a few clarifications to how ridiculous this all is:

Imagine you forged documents for years and your punishment was "send documents to prove you stopped."

     While brief, this comment pretty much sums it all up. For years, UNC submitted fraudulent documents telling SACS how legitimate UNC was. After finally being caught out, UNC’s punishment is, indeed, to submit another document telling SACS that UNC is legitimate. Good faith, you see.

      I’m not a bad person, I generally think the best of people, but I assure the gentle reader that UNC isn’t remotely the only school doing this. The for-profits receive condemnation for their frauds, but the only difference is the for-profit schools are actually being investigated by (more) legitimate bodies than accreditors. The only reason frauds at non-profits (and particularly state schools) are not being regularly exposed and shown to be massive is because there is no legitimate entity to do such an investigation. They’re fully accredited after all, and…good faith!

      It’s weird how so often I disagree with an article’s coverage, but generally don’t have a problem with the comments (ignoring the very brief comments). A rare comment I take issue with:

     About time, but I'm not sure probation is sufficient. I know of schools that have been closed for less. I don't care if this is UNC--this violation is pretty serious. There need to be more than cosmetic changes.

       Schools have been closed for less? When and where? Outside of a few for-profits that were shut down by accreditation (more accurately, the Feds shut them down for wildly blatant fraud, and accreditation lamely decided after the fact that the schools should be shut down), I’ve seen perhaps one other school…but that school was closing anyway. I’ve never seen a state school shut down by accreditation, but then I’ve never seen one realistically investigated. Good faith!

One year of probation for 20 years of unethical behavior. I'm sure some of the NCAA schools who lost scholarships and were not allowed post season play would love that kind of punishment.

     Ultimately, this is why the fraud at UNC was, eventually, caught: it was simply too blatant for the other sportsball institutions to overlook. UNC’s fraud was helping UNC win games, and that was cutting into the sportsball wins at the other schools. But this issue goes far deeper than sportsball, even as I begrudgingly yield my gratitude to college sportsball for its help in revealing this fraud.

     Does anyone not see that this light penalty will motivate other schools, especially sportsball-fanatic schools, to double down on the fraud?

      The completely blind and deaf accreditor who overlooked the decades of systematic fraud and lies of UNC-Chapel Hill? If you open a school in North Carolina, you’ll have to use that same accreditor. Every school in Florida, in Louisiana, in Georgia, or anyplace south of UNC also has no choice but to use this fake accreditor.

     Keep that in mind: every school that uses SACS could just as easily run a 20 year fraud, and now knows that the penalty for it will be a year of probation. Gee, how do parents feel about sending their kids to one of these schools? Just assume good faith by the school, you’ll be fine. I guess.

Really? It's time for SACS to be sacked. Every single institution that has worked hard to earn its accreditation from SACS should sue for fraud over this because any accreditation it grants is meaningless. Talk about an accrediting agency being a discredit to the profession! If UNC's 20 years of institutionalized fraud doesn't merit the permanent loss of accreditation, then nothing does.

      And so every degree from a SACS-accredited school should not even mention it came from an accredited school because the accreditation means nothing. When you consider that Penn State’s accreditor likewise couldn’t possibly know what’s going on in the showers (because it could only hear about such incidents from the administrators—good faith!), it’s not much of a stretch to wonder if perhaps no accreditors are doing much of a job.

       We’ll just have to hope good faith is good enough. Too bad you can’t pay tuition with good faith, eh?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The NFL And Accreditation

By Professor Doom

“We exist explicitly to rip off students as brutally as possible and we will deliberately provide no education in any form.”

--this could be the corporate model and official slogan of many schools, and accreditation would have no problem at all with it, as per their written policies.

     It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how even incredibly corrupt academic institutions are allowed to keep their accreditation, their seal of legitimacy that lets them rake in huge sums of student loan money, trapping millions of our young people into a lifetime of debt slavery…without even a slap on the wrist from accreditation.

     I’ve gone over, line by line, the accreditation rules showing how ridiculous accreditation is, how it has nothing at all to do with what people think accreditation does, which is verification of legitimacy of an institution. Accreditation doesn’t do that, and never was about legitimacy. Accreditation began as a voluntary association, the institutions involved became accredited because they were already legitimate, and had good faith going in that they were going to follow accreditation’s guidelines to become better schools.

      The Federal government changed that, by making accreditation mandatory for eligibility for student loan/grant money. There was no longer any reason to have good faith in an institution wishing to become accredited. An institution could literally have “We exist explicitly to rip off students as brutally as possible and we will deliberately provide no education in any form” as the institutional motto and seek accreditation…and still become accredited. Naturally, it might be best to look legitimate until accreditation is received, but after that point, accreditation would absolutely have no issue with such an institutional motto. Allow me to explain why.

      A recent click-bait article really hit home to me how obvious it is that accreditation is completely bogus, and has no relevance to legitimacy in today’s higher education system. The article is on obscure rules in the NFL (warning: click-bait article, many pop-ups and ads). Like accreditation, the NFL has many rules to cover even obscure situations. Here’s a quick example:

Be careful if you're trying to ice the kicker. You can't call two consecutive timeouts in the same dead ball period. Something has to happen on the field before you can call the next timeout. If you don't, a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty is called.

     Neat. Note how the rule is precisely defined. Let’s take a look at a rule from SACS accreditation:

“The institution has a governing board of at least five members that is the

legal body with specific authority over the institution…The board is not controlled by a minority of board members or by organizations or interests separate from it. Both the presiding officer of the board and a majority of other voting members of the board are free of any contractual, employment, or personal or familial financial interest in the institution…”

     Again, the rules are pretty clear here. The board has to be at least 5 members, you can’t get around this rule by having members “in name” while the board is controlled by a minority, and you can’t have conflicts of interest (HOLEE COW is that last part violated with impunity!).

      Does the gentle reader see the major difference between the NFL rule, and the SACS rule? It’s in the last line of the NFL rule: a penalty for violating the rules.

     There are lots and lots of accreditation rules, but there’s no penalty at all for violating any of them, which is why you can see schools violating them, and violating them almost to the point of in-your-face. The Academy of Arts can have wild conflicts of interest in its Board, as the school pays huge rents on properties rented from Chair…it’s a clear violation of clear rules, but there’s no penalty so it doesn’t matter. Sweet Briar can get their board controlled by a minority…again, there’s no problem about this being a violation of accreditation rules when the minority took control, and I suspect that control has something to do with the mysterious bankruptcy and large sum of money vanishing. I could go on with similar outlandish violations of other rules, but it’s all the same with regard to lack of penalties. This is the big issue with accreditation, you can do whatever you want and you won’t even get a slap on the wrist. And that’s for violating explicit rules.

     The NFL even has a catch-all rule, very vague, that allows for the inconceivable, as much as such could be conceived:

A Palpably Unfair Act: …a palpably unfair act is any illegal action that the officials deem has clearly and indisputably deprived a team of a score. That may sound vague, but it's deliberately put in the rulebook that way. The penalty has never been called in the history of the NFL, but should a player on the bench ever decide to tackle a runner in order to prevent a score, the deprived team would be awarded with a touchdown.

     Even with the rule being vague, the penalty is clear. The NFL hardly has a reputation for probity and wholesome business practices, but still understands how serious rules need to be written: every rule must have a penalty for violation, otherwise it’s meaningless.

     On the other hand, accreditation had nothing to say about Penn State’s wild violations going on in the locker rooms. It was so wrong that the word “wrong” doesn’t even cover it…but accreditation doesn’t care.

      One might say Penn State’s transgression wasn’t academic and didn’t really affect students, but what of UNC’s wild academic fraud, affecting thousands of students over nearly 20 years? A fraud involving cover-ups (still ongoing), harassment of whistleblowers, a fraud so institutionalized that students were encouraged at meetings to enroll in the fake classes? Nothing, beyond a very symbolic slap on the wrist.

     So, indeed, accreditation is irrelevant. Who wants to fund me setting up my own institution with official motto of “We exist explicitly to rip off students as brutally as possible and we will deliberately provide no education in any form.” I’m sorry to ask for money for this, but there is one accreditation rule that I’ve never seen violated: failure to pay the accreditation fees. 

    See, the only thing an accreditor could do to a violator, theoretically, is to deny accreditation…but then it wouldn’t get those very lucrative accreditation fees. Institutions pay those fees not for a seal of legitimacy, but for one reason and one reason only: to secure that sweet, sweet, student loan money. 

     Of course the fees are paid, the penalty for not doing so is very clear.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Why Did The Women’s College Die?

By Professor Doom

     I’m looking at the downfall of Sweet Briar College, a fine women’s school with a stellar reputation, which, without warning, announced it was closing its doors tout-suite, no need to ask where the money went, or so admin advises.

     I think asking about the money is a good idea, but faculty rarely are blessed with true information. Luckily, a trustee of the school is willing to discuss some of what went on behind the scenes. So let’s get on with the trustee’s version of events:

“During the five-year term of the Presidency of Jo Ellen Parker, rather than none, all critical decisions were made by a small subset of the Executive Committee of which Ms. Dalton was a part.

--Dalton was on the board of directors and chair of the governance committee.

    So, the board of trustees was quickly whittled down. I can’t help but suspect that the trustees that had integrity and were indeed trustworthy were not on the Executive Plundering Committee. I know, that sounds cynical, but with close to $100,000,000 missing and obvious mismanagement, I have to be a bit suspicious.

   “  Dalton is correct that no board member was ‘fired’ per se, although I was asked to resign (and did so in June 2014) by the Chairman for unspecified reasons, and his decision was ratified by the Executive Committee.

“Five other members resigned over the previous two years out of frustration at the ham-handed, myopic and dictatorial way board affairs were conducted.

“…As far as senior staff positions are concerned, during President Parker’s term, the vice president of finance resigned. The academic dean of the faculty resigned. The director of development resigned. Two successive deans of admissions resigned. Two successive directors of marketing resigned… 

…In short, every senior staff position was replaced, some twice, in a five-year period.”

     I’ve mentioned before how you can tell when a school is being plundered—shady deals, no-confidence votes by faculty, and huge Poo Bah pay are obvious signs, as well as bloating administration and dwindling faculty. I forgot another sign: high turnover of administration and faculty.

      In the two years where my state school transformed from legitimate to bogus (after receiving accreditation), we lost a Chief Financial Officer, Vice Chancellor, Marketing Officer, and several other administrators, in addition to at least five faculty…this is high turnover for a small school. When you see this many people scrambling to escape,  it’s a sign that the people with integrity are seeing the ship sinking, and making prudent plans.

      The people that remain are usually pretty desperate for their jobs…they won’t make waves as the pirates plunder away.

     The other signs of plundering are here as well:

Contrary to Ms. Dalton’s recollection, no administrative positions were eliminated but an additional one was created, that of chief of staff.

We did have a planned program, introduced by Parker, to reduce faculty over a five-year period from a ratio of 8 to 1 to 10 to 1.

     --I again want to point out, removing just a few administrators would have offset the decline in the student base. And…shouldn’t you need less facilitators for the students when there are less students?

      Again, growth in administration, reduction in faculty…these are not rare signs in higher education. Our leaders in higher education work hard to justify their useless but highly paid jobs, and Sweet Briar was no exception:

The “Plan for Sustainable Excellence” (only the third strategic plan in seven years) did involve the entire college over a two-year period and it was, in fact, endorsed by the full board, some of whom were just happy to not hear any more platitudinous fluff replete with unrealistic numbers.

     Ah, the Vision for Excellence idiocy I’ve written of before. Administrators spend collectively thousands of hours on insane, grandiose, ridiculous plans, which they roll out every few years. Then they shelve them, never to show them again, and work on another insane, grandiose, ridiculous plan. 

 

     Most students and faculty never get to see all the details of the plan, but I was lucky enough to get to look at one in detail (I asked a lot of questions before leaving that school…). To give just one example, my own school’s Vision for Excellence plan involved multiple playing fields, and a stadium that could hold 5,000 people. The school had less than 1,000 students on campus…and the town the school was in had a population of 1,200…it was sheer gibbering madness to believe we’d ever fill a stadium of that size, particularly since the school has no sports in any form (and still doesn’t…). I’ll spare the gentle reader the rest of the details, and re-assert that these plans are grandiose to the point of ridiculousness. Administrators don’t care, they just need a plan to justify their jobs.

     This is what all those administrators spend much of their time on, making Sweet Briar’s “leadership” so busy it was unable to deal with a 2% loss per year of the student base, over the course of 5 years, a loss that could have been compensated by paring down the administration a tad.

      So many classic signs that something was going on here, it’s a shame the trustee, like most trustees, has never served as faculty at a school. If so, he could have seen what was coming:

“…all board members were specifically instructed not to contact a member of the Senior Staff without first obtaining permission of the relevant committee chair and the president. They even brought in a coach from the Association of Governing Boards (AGB), an organization solely funded by the presidential budgets of our nation’s colleges, to reinforce this stifling of involvement.

“As I can personally attest, those who even accidentally violated this rule were reprimanded by the president.”

     Ah, the seal of silence, and again, I’ve written of this before. The primary purpose of the seal of silence is to allow lies to be told, with nobody in a position to correct them, lest they risk breaking that seal. As soon as you hear “ok, stop talking to other people” you know that there are some lies going around, lies that could be quickly resolved if people were allowed to talk openly to each other.

      The former trustee believes the school could have been saved but for the poor leadership of the Poo Bah, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. I hope some independent investigators will take a long hard look at where the money went, and I’ll certainly suggest looking at the finances of the Poo Bah and the Executive Board, because much like with another plundered school, the numbers just don’t add up. 

     No discussion of a school’s failure is complete without mentioning how accreditation failed. Every single fraud, every single scandal, every single failure in higher education always has the “if accreditors did their job, this wouldn’t have happened” clause:

Regardless of board size, the SACS--which accredits Sweet Briar and other southern colleges and schools--has as one of its "core requirements" that "The board is not controlled by a minority of board members..." What Mr. Leslie describes is a board that had, indeed, evolved into a body that was controlled by a minority of its members. I think a case might be made that this board as it was operating when Mr. Leslie resigned was in violation of that accreditation requirement.

      I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve identified the useless, bogus, nature of accreditation as a hugely contributing factor to the decay of higher education. Could Sweet Briar be saved by attentive accreditation? A moot point, as there are no penalties for violating accreditation anyway (probably why I’ve seen every accreditation rule violated with impunity, except payment of accrediting fees).

      One last comment that gives a fair assessment of what happened to Sweet Briar:

700 women can't support enough administrators, so it's time to close.  
 
Very sad.

     I can’t help but think of my friend, a former faculty of Sweet Briar; he only dropped hints of what he saw, but it was enough for him to throw his mathematics Ph.D. in the trash and get away from higher education. He was obviously much smarter than I am, and I should have followed his example. Staying in higher education may well have been a big mistake for me, but I’ll accept my mistake and go down swinging all the same.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com