🏀 KuBuckets Archive

"Wainstein said his interviews revealed that basketball coach Roy Williams was "uncomfortable with clustering" in the African-American Studies department because of the optics that players were being steered toward that major. Early in his tenure at North Carolina, he asked his assistant coach in charge of academic matters and the basketball team's primary academic counselor not to steer players toward those classes."--Dan Wolken. USA Today, October 23, 2014
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2014/10/22/north-carolina-academic-fraud/17717243/ ↗

How do board rats interpret this?

@jaybate-1.0 It just said he was uncomfortable. He never said he didn't do it lol. Man up Roy and make a statement that there is no truth to any of this just like when President Clinton said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman". Then we can put this to rest!!!

@Statmachine

Well, said.

The only think I have been trying to do is to sort out exactly what violation, if any was committed. I am still trying to find some law, regulation, rule, or standard that was broken in all of this.

So far someone has said that maybe teaching the courses the way they did might cause an accreditation organization to jeopardize UNC's accreditation. Do you think this issue involving African and African American Studies that the UNC Chancellor claims was fixed around four years ago is going to jeopardize UNC's accreditation across the board? Wow! I mean Memphis played a bunch of ineligible guys all season and in the '08 Finals against KU and I don't recall anyone guessing that Memphis accreditation might be pulled across the board? Heck, I don't even recall anyone saying even a small part of Memphis' accreditation might be pulled, do you?

I keep wondering if there might be something special about UNC, UNC basketball, or the state of North Carolina, that would make it really desirable to unleash this type of a scandal.

I mean think about KU's Scalpinggate. There was some real, tangible law breaking going on there. Persons were making big monies on selling tickets and not reporting the income to IRS. Now that's a coherent scandal. I still can't quite get my mind around what the exact violation is, can you?

Can anyone go to jail for easy classes?

Does a university have a fiduciary responsibililty to provide hard classes instead of easy classes? or would it be just medium hard, or medium easy classes it has to provide to meet its fiduciary responsibility? Does it have to provide class meetings? to provide a service that checks to determine if a student is turning in his own work, or someone else's?

I am serious about this.

I really cannot tell where this is heading.

And when the lawyers get done with it, who will be able to document more damages? Players or schools? Or what about damages to athletic departments?

Or what if its all a media scandal; i.e., what if it were just to have a life in the media, but never go much farther?

I do think some player-lawyer combination will probably try to bring a complaint, but I haven't at this point a clue of what kind of a decision might result.

This seems really slippery terrain to a laymen looking from way outside at just the shallowest part of this so far.

C'mon non conference season!

@jaybate-1.0 : Maybe you can find what you're looking for here. It's about independent study courses and on UNC site.
Independent Study Policy ↗

@Kip_McSmithers Thanks.

@jaybate-1.0 Man, I hate to see Roy put on the hotseat like this. Even if he did have prior knowledge of this stuff happening at UNC, they could forfeit their wins and title from 05. Bummer. Id rather it be Kentucky. Still waiting for Calimari to blow it somehow. We can only hope.

@Lulufulu

If it was with his knowledge, it's pretty clear that he cheated. Right now, he's in a worse position than Calipari has ever been in, because the academic advisor that was overseeing all of this was his own handpicked guy. He may still be exonerated, but I'm not sure he can maintain his reputation from this. The stink is on him whether he likes it or not. Especially because he pretty well blasted McCants for some of the things that he said a few years ago that are now turning out to be either absolutely true, or likely true.

@Lulufulu

"Man, I hate to see Roy put on the hotseat like this."

Me, too. But if there is any chance of Roy saving his reputation, it will come from sitting on the hotseat for as long as necessary and for Roy to be straightforward.

I haven't always enjoyed confidence with Roy and his ability to handle his comments and actions publicly. He has often faced unnecessary criticism because of his actions or comments. This is an area I give a huge advantage to Self and how he handles himself publicly.

@jaybate-1.0

"Does a university have a fiduciary responsibililty to provide hard classes instead of easy classes?"

No. The university has a moral obligation to offer classes that provide some qualitative form of education through various forms of academic structure. The goals can vary, from methods directed towards information immersion to a pathway for sparking creativity.

As far as making classwork "easy" or "hard" the goal should be to make the methodology as easy as possible to obtain the objectives of the particular class. The goal is to make a class "successful"... meaning... finding the most effective methods for advancing the students within the objectives.

I'm 30+ years away from my college education and I have retained (and used) more information from my easier classes. I believe if a class has plenty of content and is easy, I retain more of the content because it is easier to retain the content.

Many of my harder classes seemed to make no sense, and became a futile exercise in memorization that largely ended up being short-term memorization. Cramming for finals and then vomiting the material out of my consciousness the second I walked out of the classroom after my finals. If the goal is to just make it hard, then I guess that has some merits, too, in proving students' abilities to be disciplined and grind through grunt. But advancements in our society (today) seem to often come from accomplishing through paths of least resistance, and we are reaping big rewards from this approach!

@drgnslayr said:

No. The university has a moral obligation to...

Eh, I think you might have gotten me off the dime of uncertainty, and perhaps just persuaded me that absolutely no substantive punishment will come to UNC, Roy, Chancellor Folts, or the prior Chancellor, or the prior Vice Chancellor (our current Chancellor), when this is all played out.

Universities, though I am one of their strong advocates, appear IMHO among the world's slipperiest, and political of bureaucracies.

They call raising money "development."

There endeth the lesson. :-)