A Brilliant Response To How UNC Handled Its Scandal

Out of all the responses to the UNC scandal we’ve read we don't think anyone has impressed us more than this piece from UNC grad Butch Bracknell who sums things up about as well as anyone could.

You’ll want to read the whole thing but check out this excerpt first:

The key finding by the NCAA is this: After thousands of students took advantage of an unethical professor and secretary who administered nonexistent paper classes and handed out unearned grades, the NCAA observed that Carolina’s position was to embrace that academic sham as a legitimate class...A singular principle allowed UNC room to make its claims and, ultimately, limited the panel’s ability to conclude that academic fraud occurred...[T]he NCAA could have burned UNC to the ground with sanctions but for the fact that UNC stood by the position that a sham class, which students did not attend and for which shoddy work resulted in acceptable marks papering the grading files, complied with Carolina’s own standards. It is not that academic fraud did not occur. It is that the NCAA is bound by the university’s determination on this pretend class meeting its own standards. That is humiliating, and should sting us all, and particularly those who attended and graduated.

He might have extended that to the entire state but other than that, this is about the best summation of the whole mess we’ve seen.