The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s treatment of researcher and learning specialist Mary Willingham, whose “analysis of academically at-risk athletes at UNC-Chapel Hill showed that more than half were reading on an elementary or middle school level and about 10 percent could hardly read at all,” is troubling. Yes, Willingham’s revelations have embarrassed UNC nationally, and yes, it is the cardinal sin at universities for an employee to do that, but the time has long since past for UNC to worry about a national disgrace over its systemic academic fraud for athletics.
Now is the time to root it out entirely and institute a “Carolina Way” that North Carolinians can be proud of and that can serve as a national model. If that means more embarrassing revelations on the way, so be it.
The CNN report that showcased Willingham’s research — which, to be clear, was of academically at-risk athletes, not all student-athletes at UNC — also found only
one person in addition to Willingham who has ever collected data on the topic. University of Oklahoma professor Gerald Gurney found that about 10% of revenue-sport athletes there were reading below a fourth-grade level.
So, after consulting with several academic experts, CNN filed public records requests and concluded that what Willingham found at UNC and Gurney found at Oklahoma is also happening elsewhere.
This is the NCAA’s revenue-sports secret that dare not speak its name, even though nearly everyone has always suspected it. Willingham has already been receiving the de rigueur death threats that anyone who upsets rabid college sports fans receives (including players, coaches, reporters, and others), but she has also had to file a grievance against UNC for changes to her job that she alleges were made in order to make her quit.
As the new controversy has gained steam, UNC has ramped up its attempts to dismiss Willingham’s research. First they acted as if the allegations came out of nowhere. Then Willingham showed that she had twice alerted UNC officials last summer of her findings.
One of her findings was that a basketball player admitted as a student-athlete to UNC-Chapel Hill — which is a top research institution, a flagship public university, a “Public Ivy” proud of its high bar for admission — was completely illiterate; he could neither read nor write. That is important because, academic fraud aside, the unspoken fear of the athletics scandal at UNC has always been that it would touch its cherished basketball program (I wrote here in 2011 that UNC’s “last hope” is that “people will believe that this institution-wide, systemic academic fraud and other, deeply ingrained scandalous behavior is hermetically sealed within the football program and doesn’t extend to, say, baseball and basketball”).
So basketball coach Roy Williams was brought out to complain that the allegations were “totally unfair” to all the student-athletes, and when that proved insufficient because Willingham offered to show the coach proof of one of his player’s illiteracy, he said it was “not my place” to meet with her. (To be clear, there is unfairness being committed against student-athletes who do belong at UNC academically; the unfairness, the reputation-besmirching by association, is all being done by the university for admitting into their peer group people who, if they can read or write, cannot do so beyond an 8th grade level.)
Next up was Chancellor Carol Folt, who offered a rebuttal of sorts, using data from 2012-13 (years outside of Willingham’s study period) to say she “take[s] these claims very seriously, but we have been unable to reconcile these claims with either our own facts or with those data currently being cited as the source for the claims.”
The admissions office also released information from 2004-12 that 97 percent of all student-athletes admitted met CNN’s criteria for college-literate, and also that
Of the 34 students recruited for football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball who did not meet the threshold, 20 students (59 percent) either have graduated from the University or remain enrolled and in good academic standing. Another 10 students (29 percent) left the University academically eligible to return. The other four students left the University and would have to restore their academic eligibility in order to return.
The use of graduation or academic standing as a defense falls upon cursory examination, however, given that the scandal has grown out of the finding that athletes were knowingly steered to sham courses with no instructors. That finding came out after the Honor Court was in such a rush to restore academic standing to a player that they missed the fact that the work he used to help his case had been obviously plagiarized, and after the Honor Court granted a star football player permission to add a new class — in time to be eligible to play in the big game — in mid-October, halfway through the semester, a month and a half past the deadline to add a class without instructor permission, which was apparently to replace the class for which he was under investigation for academic fraud.
Unfair as it is to the academically prepared UNC student-athletes, “good academic standing” is no longer a trustworthy measure by which to defend UNC’s admissions as it pertains to athletes in revenue sports.
Today’s new is even more disheartening for those interested in reform and a new, model “Carolina Way.” The university has suspended Willingham’s research. The justification for so doing is that “Willingham had released data that could identify research subjects.”
If she did, the question now is over whether UNC tricked Willingham into committing that mistake. Consider:
But university officials disputed the findings and sought to see the data. This week, Willingham turned over data to Provost Jim Dean, who said he wanted to see it to determine how she arrived at her findings. Willingham said at the time that she had not wanted to turn over the data for fear she would violate research regulations.
Willingham couldn’t be reached Thursday night after the research suspension was announced. Her co-investigator on the research project, Richard Southall, said he didn’t know when the university was saying that the violation occurred.
“My question is, ‘Did that violation occur when the data was forwarded on to the provost?'” said Southall, director of the College Sports Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.
Dean said in a statement that was not the case.
As attested to above, the scandal goes beyond UNC. Its implications threaten the NCAA itself:
This week, Mary Willingham, the UNC learning specialist who blew the whistle on the lecture-style classes that never met, was named as a witness for the attorneys representing current and former college athletes in a class-action suit against the NCAA. The lawsuit is commonly known as the O’Bannon case, after former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon. He sued after seeing his likeness being used in EA sports video games without being paid.
The case, nearly 5 years old, has a trial date in June. Michael Hausfeld, one of the attorneys representing the athletes, said Willingham’s experiences as a former learning specialist for the athletes’ support program, plus her research into the academic abilities of those athletes, make her a strong witness. She would counter the NCAA’s claims that athletes can be barred from being paid for their athletic efforts because the universities are providing them an education.
Beyond that, beyond the money, there is a long, sad train of barely literate athletes victimized by the universities and the NCAA’s system that “works to keep them on the field and get them through college, but it is a terrible failure at helping get them through life when the cheering stops.”
This situation has long been suspected, however — which means that the public has been willing to be blind to it, or at least to tolerate it insofar as it remains hidden. UNC is one of the top standard-bearers for college athletics, so this scandal resonates all the more.
By the same token, however, UNC can set a new course for student-athletes in revenue sports that could inspire other universities to follow. That should be the aim now.
