The University of Southern California, which is facing the Federal, Civil, and NCAA fallout from the Fake Athlete Admissions Scandal has hired recently terminated UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt as its new President.
Folt was the chancellor who cover the end of UNC-CH’s academic scandal and the presided over the toppling of the Silent Sam statue. She resigned effective May 2019, but the Board of Trustees terminated immediately after she removed the pedestal of the statue in January.
Academia is different than every other field. Incompetence does not impede one’s career progress. Holden Thorpe, the previous UNC-CH Chancellor who intervened to hire Butch Davis as football coach, which started UNC’s improper benefits scandal that revealed the academic scandal, landed on his feet at Washington University in St. Louis.
I mean, really at this point, why would the cheating scandal matter for her career track record? It might have made for some slightly bad optics but no real consequences came about. There was no ramifications of any kind on the athletic side, and on the academic side nothing of consequence occurred either, UNC is still an accredited university.
I’ll go further. She was the chancellor while the largest academic athletic fraud in history was prosecuted and her school came out virtually unscathed. Sounds like someone you want on your side when trying to cover up a huge scandal at another prestigious school. It’s disgusting, but it’s real.