BusinessWeek (and Bernie) on UNC-CH Mess

BobLee
January03/ 2014

I usually leave that ooey-gooey malingering mess over at UNC-CH to BobLee. He knows that turf much better than I do. But within the past week both the New York Times and BusinessWeek have weighed in….. AND THEN my like-minded pal Bernie Reeves “went Buford Pusser” on the whole shebang.

When BR was done, Franklin Street looked like Main Street in Nagasaki in August 1945. You do not want to miss this one…..

By now pretty much every animal, vegetable and most minerals on this planet know about “what happened after Marvin Austin tweeted” four or so years ago – aka The Tweet Heard ‘Round Academia.

“A butterfly flaps its wings” and a Class Five Hurricane is birthed in The Azores. Every Tsunami begins with one little ripple. Every avalanche starts when one pebble begins rolling downhill. You get my drift here.

Young Marvin was a prominent Tar Heel footballer who ventured into the dens of forbidden benefits and then tweeted quite proudly about doing it. One thing led to MANY more things and…..

(1) Butch Davis, Dickie Baddour and Holden Thorp are no longer employed by UNC-CH.

(2) 1,000s of UNC-CH opponents and proponents have mangled the spelling of Nyang’oro and…..

(3) The term “Carolina Way” has been used in more jokes than “a guy walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder and…….”.

I will assume you are familiar with enough of the “who shot John” details of this Gordian Knot of Academic Administrative Septic Sludge to allow us to skip ahead to “the latest”.

The NY Times and BusinessWeek started off 2014 with broadside barrages at “the UNC-CH Mess”. The BW piece builds on the NYT article. Neither are likely to be well received by current UNC Chancellor Carol Folt FROM DARTMOUTH. That is actually her full name by the way.

She is also very short AND very reluctant to express any opinions other than “I’m soooo excited to be here!” That might change in the months ahead.

The afore-mentioned naughty AfAm Professor – Julius Nyang’oro has been indicted and is now vowing to “sing like a canary” about “who knew what and how long those who knew what”. That vowing oughta generate massive acid reflux in folks named Baddour and Moeser.

NOTE: I have respected acquainti on both the UNC BOG and UNC-CH BOT who, I know for a fact, offered sage advice at various stages of this mess as to how best to correct and minimize its trainwreck potential. That advice was routinely ignored….. and VOILA – “Trainwreck”.

So anyhoo….. read the BW article (LINK) then come back here and enjoy my buddy Bernie Reeves’ rip-roaring rant on The Franklin Street Follies.

Bernie Reeves is Publisher of Metro magazine and founder of the weekly Spectator, Triangle Business, and the Raleigh Spy Conference (www.raleighspyconference.com ) and a longtime observer and commentator on all things Triangular. Bernie is also a like-minded pal of this website and its namesake. We share an addictive predilection to tweak the terminally pompous and skewer them what deserve skewering.

I received this from BR while dining in a 4-star restaurant. When I opened it I was afraid it was going to set off the fire extinguishers. 🙂

Ladies and Gentlemen….. I proudly present the uncensored opinions of my pal Bernie Reeves:
______

I don’t think the UNC AFAM fake course scandal should be twinned with the Penn State outrage, and I find it laughable the writer waxes on about UNC’s rigorous academic requirements. In the liberal arts there have been no university level standards enforced there since the early 1980s.

I assure you, classes in Queer Studies, Gender Studies, LGBT Studies, Environmental Studies, The History of Hip Hop Culture, Bollywood Cinema Cowboys, Samurai, and Rebels in Film and Fiction, and Love, Sex, and Marriage in Soviet Culture require as little class time, legitimate outside reading, rigorous testing or free and open discussion as African American Studies.

In other words, it’s not that athletes take crip courses, hardly a surprise. It’s that courses across the board are scandalously dumbed-down due to their subject matter. The entire formerly vaunted liberal arts program is politically designed and dangerous to young minds. I’d rather watch a competitive Carolina football game over giving a damn about the disaster on campus I and others have seen coming for 35 years.

It’s too late anyway The inmates not only run the asylum, they own it since no chancellor, system president, board of governors member or trustee will put them in strait-jackets before they do more harm.

And what about Orange County being involved and indicting people over NCAA decisions? What a cheap grandstand play.

And exclaiming that athletics scandals have ruined the academic reputation of UNC is disingenuous. Professors used to say that, but they cannot anymore or risk the ire of their fellow traveling radical peers who will not object to the recruitment of unqualified athletes because they are predominately black. It’s one dimension of the schools’ wide-ranging affirmative outreach that works.

***

You can enjoy more unfettered Bernie at METRO….. LINK.

http://berniereeves.com/

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