Gov. Martin's UNC report on academic corruption is a fallacy | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Former Governor and emeritus Davidson College chemistry professor Jim Martin has issued his report on the investigation of crip courses at UNC-CH. It was essentially an exoneration of the Big Shots in the UNC system and the system itself. It pinned the blame on a couple of administrators who have already been tarred (no pun intended) and feathered and put out to pasture. Click here to read the report.

    The report did little to assuage the concern about academic corruption at UNC-CH. Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger is reported to have said that the Report raised more questions than it answered. And indeed that is true.

    What the Report only alludes to is actually the major problem: The Academic Culture in our UNC system. And that culture is corrupt to its core. The problem is a systemic one, not one caused by a couple of weak faculty or administrators.

    What the controversy revealed is that there were hundreds of course sections over the last couple of decades that awarded credit to students for doing virtually nothing and learning even less. Oh, wow. And that is news? Only, in this instance, because an abundance of those students were athletes and running athletes through crip courses creates competition issues with other schools, so they scream and hope nobody looks too closely at them.
The Old Well on the University of North Carolina Campus in Chapel Hill: Above.     photo by Stan Deatherage
    The Martin Study was designed very well. It used statistical analysis to find possible "anomalies" and then it investigated the questions raised by the numbers. No problem with that. It's a sound approach.

    This was the second such study done on the issue at UNC-CH. This one found about the same thing as the first one. Martin says that corrections have already been made. That's not true.

    The problem is the culture that produced the "anomalies" in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies (AFRE/AFAM). And we suspect the athletes simply took advantage of the lack of academic rigor in that department, just as probably many fraternity and sorority types did also. In other words, the students who were connected learned very quickly which courses to take if you simply want the easy way out. Nothing new there. It happened at Davidson when Prof. Martin was there. It happens everywhere.

    We suspect one reason the problem afflicted the AFRE/AFAM department was that it is not politically correct at UNC-CH to challenge anything in that department, just as it is not in "Women's Studies" on many campuses. You're not kool if you even question why such programs even exist, at taxpayer expense. Courses in both of those departments, just as some in the sciences, are designed to promulgate a liberal agenda based on political correctness. You just don't challenge such things on a university campus.

    And that leads to the real problem: How the university system determines what will be taught and what kind of programs will be supported. That is done, in my experience, in two ways: Tradition and agenda driven.

    The traditional approach is what you would think it is. There is a generally accepted set of disciplines and courses within those disciplines that have existed for years, in many cases going back to the Middle Ages. There is another set of programs and courses that are technical and occupationally derived. The Masters in Business Administration is an example of the classical approach. In my field (Educational Leadership) there is a generally accepted scope and sequence for what core courses a school principal or superintendent needs to master. Some examples are: school law, finance, curriculum principles etc. Then there are the fillers, which are often the frills. Every department and program has them. In science these days a typical example would be courses related to environmental issues and even such things as climate change. Those things don't get questioned.

    So what happens is that much of the curriculum in the university system is established by tradition. A good part of it is determined by what a student needs to know and be able to do to make a living in their field upon graduation. Then there are the AFRI/AFAM type programs and courses. These I call "agenda" courses. They exist because special interests want to push an agenda.

    Let me use a couple of "not kool" examples. ROTC is one such example. Why do universities teach ROTC? It is not to train military officers. Each military branch will do that once the ROTCy students graduate. So why would a college course teach students how to march and do rifle drills? My answer is: For the same reason that they dress these students up in attractive uniforms (attractive in the same sense as buzz cut haircuts) and put insignia on them to create an esprit de corps among the students and to telegraph to those not enrolled that military science is a worthy endeavor in which to engage. ROTC is not science any more than a major in driver's education should be called a Bachelor of Science degree. For Pete's sake, you can get a Masters or even a Ph.D in drivers ed.at some schools. Think about it. If you had to design a program that was going to require twelve 3-semester-hour courses (roughly 45 clock hours per course, or 540 hours) to prepare someone to teach a student how to drive a car, what would you include in the program of studies? I would dare say you'd have a hard time making good use of all of those hours of instruction. And that says nothing about all the "out-of-class" time/assignments.

    So how do such programs as these come to exist? The oversimplified answer is that they exist because a special interest pushed hard enough and administrators without backbones succumbed to the politically correct idea that frivolity was actually important enough to exhaust valuable resources on it rather than something that was time tested, would earn the graduate a living or had sufficient rigor so as to ward off the neer-do-wells. In other words, such programs and courses are approved by sycophant administrators obsessed with being politically correct.

    But that said, it begs the question of why such a system exists. The answer is faculty governance. Faculty governance is the idea that the really important decisions in a university must be made by the faculty and they are the only ones smart enough to know what should be done or how to do it. Dr. Martin alludes to it in his Report when he says that the system broke down when faculty did not blow the whistle on academic corruption. This is caused by the Inverse Golden Rule of Academia. As the Report characterized it: "I won't question what you do if you don't question what I do."

    Most universities, and I suspect every public institution, operate on the principle that the faculty makes the decisions of what is taught, who teaches it and what the requirements are. The usual presumption is then that each professor then determines how to teach the course and grade the students. You don't question that simply because you don't want someone holding you accountable for how you teach and grade your classes. And even though the faculty governance system is supposed to insure accountability for programs and courses it works only if faculty members are willing blow the whistle when the train jumps the tracks. But the Inverse Golden Rule prevents that. You don't question what someone else does because you don't want to be questioned about what you/your department is doing.

    Let me use a personal example. I taught School Law. In that course the system "approved syllabus" called for a unit in "Legal Reasoning." Included in legal reasoning was such things as deductive and inductive reasoning. Also included was consideration of the philosophical (logic) concept of "fallacies." My tactic for teaching fallacies (false reasoning) was to tell the students at the beginning of class that a fallacy was a concept that appears to be correct or true but actually is not. If the concept is actually false and appears to be false it is obviously a fallacy. But if it appears to be true but is actually false it is likewise a fallacy so therefore appearances don't determine what is true or not. The example used was to posit that "black students are not as smart as white students." (The students in these classes are to-be-school administrators). "Is that true or false?" I would ask. Either way the students answered they were required to offer factual substantiation or logical reasoning to support their answer. I would then "prove" that more people (even many of our judges), including particularly real estate agents, believe the correct answer is "true." Why? Because the real estate agents typically push the "whitest" schools as being more desirable. Many houses have been sold on that reasoning. And there is a whole line of court cases based on this reasoning, that white is superior. And if you do a correlation of test scores you typically find a high correlation between the race of the students and their scores on virtually any generally accepted measure of student competence. So what does that prove? To liberals, while they pretend to abhor racial discrimination, they argue for racially balance schools. And that is a fallacy even if it makes them feel better. The fact is that none of these facts nor any of this reasoning makes it true that blacks are not as smart. Something else is going on that causes the "facts" to be as they are.

    After giving the students an opportunity to debate the issue, the correct answer, I would suggest, is that other variables cause lower black student performance and it really does not have anything to do with how "smart" one race is over the other. In fact, there is almost always a higher correlation between student achievement and father's income than there is for race. So what does that mean? It only means, in the context of this lesson, that just because something appears to be true does not make it true and if you accept it as such you are accepting a fallacy as true. Sound reasoning requires that if you reach a true conclusion, you must first determine the variables affecting that conclusion before you can conclude what causes the condition. If you jump to a conclusion you are likely to end up accepting a fallacy. But it is easy to misunderstand this reasoning. As mentioned, many court causes have done just that.

    That lesson was always highly emotionally charged. You could see many students squirm during the class when challenged, no matter which position they took. Usually one or more (typically black) students would complain to the department chair or administrators. "Blinson's teaching that black students are inherently inferior" was the cry. I know they complained because they would tell me they did.

    But you know what. Not once did an administrator ever question me on what I was doing. Not once did a department chair ask me what I was teaching and why. Nor did any of my colleagues, including the others who taught the same course. I presume some students misinterpreted the lesson and no doubt jumped to the conclusion that I was a racist. But for more than ten years I never was asked to explain how I taught "fallacies" in legal reasoning.

    If I had been challenged I was prepared. I would have explained that one cannot accurately understand Brown v. the Board of Education (separate schools are inherently unequal) or Swan v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (busing to achieve racial balance), Bakke v. Bd. of Regents (affirmative action) etc.without first understanding fallacious reasoning.

    But suppose what I was actually teaching was "blacks are inherently inferior"? What do you think would have happened? The correct answer is: The same thing...nothing.

    The point is: As long as what professors are doing is politically correct they are not going to be challenged. Only when they jump the traces of political correctness will they be seriously challenged. And typically not even then. Faculty governance guarantees accountability immunity.

    The problem in the UNC Department of African and Afro-American Studies was and is: Political correctness within faculty governance. And with all due respect and admiration for Governor Martin, his report is fallacious in reporting that the problem was confined to two administrators and one department. The truth is the problem is endemic throughout the university system. And we suspect Sen. Berger senses this.

    The question is, after Dr. Martin's whitewash, will anything meaningful be done about it.

    Don't hold your breath.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.