College That Offered ‘1619 Project’ Creator a Professorship Has History of Fraud in Black Studies

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the racial bomb-thrower and author of the “1619 Project” series whose historical research was discredited by historians across the political spectrum, has been offered a professorship at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), setting off a firestorm over whether it should come with tenure or not.

But the university’s willingness to give a prestigious professor chair to a racialist whose reputation is associated with serious inaccuracy is all the more remarkable considering the fact that UNC is still recovering from one of the most notorious academic fraud scandals in recent history, in which the African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department gave virtually illiterate students top grades and ran no-show classes.

In 2012, an audit found that between 2007 and 2009, at least 52 courses had professors who never or rarely showed up. The department also awarded grades for “independent studies” that did not involve any classes. Other times, grades assigned by actual classes were mysteriously changed by someone within the department later.

“Lax Departmental administrative oversight and practices” thwarted investigators from fully documenting the extent of the fraud, the report said. But Mary Willingham, an academic advisor who blew the whistle, said, “Some of these college students could read at a second or third grade level… Students were taking classes that really didn’t exist. They were called independent studies at that time and they just had to write a paper… There was no attendance.”

One student took a high-level 400-level AFAM course and received a B+, even though he later had to enroll in “English 100, Basic Writing.”

Another student’s college term paper on Rosa Parks, clocking in at one paragraph long, read in its entirety:

On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. ‘Let me have those front seats’ said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. ‘I’m going to have you arrested,’ said the driver. {snip}

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Department chair Julius Nyang’oro was charged with felony fraud for allegedly accepting pay for a class he did not teach, but the charges were dropped. He resigned as chair.

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