Always Suspected

There’s a surprisingly common belief in this country that major universities – and especially those with highly successful sports teams – maintain phantom courses on their schedule; classes that are recorded and graded as if they were normal academic subjects but which never meet and for which no work is ever required. It’s part of the stereotype of all college athletes being dumb jocks who are only there to play their particular sport, and of college athletics as hopelessly corrupt – effectively professional sports in everything but name. Like most generalizations, this one is at least partly hogwash. I have had a number of student-athletes in my classes at Michigan State, and I can confirm that all of them sat for their own exams and did their own in-class work, often brilliantly. I’ve actually had fewer attendance problems with the athletes in my classes than I have with the general population, and I’ve never heard of any of these “phantom” classes, at least in the Business School. According to a story that popped up last month, however, this may not be the case at North Carolina…

You can pick up the original story on the New York TimesSports page online if you want to, but what they’re talking about is an internationally-known professor and long-serving chairman of the African and Afro-American studies department at UNC Chapel Hill being indicted for having received payment for teaching classes that never happened – and which mainly enrolled athletes from North Carolina’s more popular and lucrative varsity teams. In many universities this sort of thing would be detected quickly, since it is unusual for the chair of a department to teach classes at all, and typical oversight would have noticed something fishy, but apparently the African and Afro-American studies department and related disciplines at UNC are highly Balkanized, and very little scrutiny is given to anything. The first, and frequently only, defense against this kind of shenanigans is the supervision of the department chair – which will not help much when he or she is the one committing the fraud…

Now, it’s possible that this is an isolated case, and the rest of the classes taken by student-athletes at North Carolina are completely legitimate. It’s even possible that this whole story is a misunderstanding, a witch hunt, or just really bad record-keeping, and that none of these allegations will prove to be true – there has been no court decision yet, and until there is we must assume that the professor in our story is innocent. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that every one of these accusations is correct, or even that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I’m calling it to your attention mostly because of the breakdown this represents in the university system – and the fact that any of these events are taking place is enough to prove that the breakdown, at least, is very real…

In almost any business enterprise, the individual who spends the money and the individual who authorizes the expenses should not be the same person. In the case of publically-held corporations, third-party audits are a Federal requirement, and in most government organizations (including state universities) the fiscal officer who reviews expenditures (including salary) can’t be the same person who is authorizing those expenditures. Unfortunately, such protocols are often ignored or circumvented as cumbersome, slow, or wasteful, since “everyone knows” that their company or agency would never hire anyone who would falsify financial records in the first place. In extreme cases this leads to scandals like the Enron and Global Crossing situations, but in academia it can lead to a well-respected institution granting college credit for classes that never actually existed…

In the long run I strongly suspect that the UNC case will prove to be a rare aberration in an otherwise honorable profession. Whether that will come about because no one is actually perpetrating such frauds, or because everyone else in America who is guilty of such malfeasance takes the hint from this case and starts looking for other ways to game the system remains to be seen, of course…