Correction:
It is yet another phoney viral email going around
Analysis: While it's true that Oregon State University head basketball coach Craig Robinson is Michelle Obama's brother, virtually everything else in this message is false.
Far from having his job on the chopping block, Robinson's six-year coaching contract with OSU was recently extended through 2016 (an additional two years), and it had nothing to do with federal stimulus grants, according to Assistant OSU Athletic Director Steve Fenk. "For the record," he said in an email, "Craig Robinson has coached Oregon State to its best back-to-back seasons since the early 1990s."
Furthermore, though Oregon State has received a total of over $26,000,000 in federal stimulus grants to date — at least half of it in 2009 — there is no record of Department of Education Under Secretary Martha Kanter (or any other government official) being "dispatched to Corvallis with $17,000,000 in stimulus money."
When I asked OSU Director of Athletics Bob De Carolis to comment on this rumor — which is as much a smear against him as it is against Coach Robinson and the Obama administration — his response was succinct: "There is absolutely no truth to any of this, period."
correction sources:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/barackobama/a/craig_robinson_job_stimulus.htm
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/oregonstate.asp
The erroneous information email:
This story is fake:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/oregonstate.asp