Kudos to the University of North Carolina for at least owning up to the rotten way it first reacted to the news that student athletes received credit for classes that didn’t really exist.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, UNC’s executive vice chancellor and provost, James Dean, admitted, “We made mistakes. Horrible things happened that I’m ashamed of” — things that hurt the “integrity of our university.” And he says UNC is busy fixing it.
We hope so. But what still troubles us is the way the university has gone after the UNC researcher, Mary Willingham, who touched off this scandal when she reported that many athletes are reading at grade-school levels. Dean has called this a “lie,” though he later softened that.
We can’t speak to the veracity of Willingham’s specific findings. We do note, however, that a former UNC college dean, Madeline Levine, has weighed in to say she knew instances where the university had admitted athletes who couldn’t even read at high school level — including one she suspected was functionally illiterate.
We also note the universities are not disinterested entities here: They earn millions from their athletes, who are unpaid.
So maybe Willingham got some of her specific findings wrong. But the university’s 180-degree reversal confirms she’s got the larger narrative right.
In any case, it shouldn’t be hard to get to the facts on athlete reading levels. And it strikes us that a university truly bent on addressing something it says it is “ashamed of” would be working with Mary Willingham to get to the truth, not against her.