"Academically at risk"
"Academically under-prepared"
"Not ready for college-level work"
"Special Talent exemptions"
These are familiar terms often used for a small segment of collegiate student-athletes when discussing the balance between college academics and athletics. While each phrase might convey a slightly different tone, each is non-specific and general enough as to not typically ruffle feathers.
But what about...?
"Can't read at the college level"or the most incendiary:
"Middle school reading equivalent"
"Non-reader"
"Functionally Illiterate"That's a whole different ball of wax, isn't it? Unless the student-athlete is someone like Dexter Manley -- or Dasmine Cathey -- who is courageous enough to self-profess a reading deficiency, such a characterization as "illiterate" is viewed as disparaging to student-athletes. It certainly doesn't reflect well on the college, not only if an illiterate student is admitted without first requiring "remediation," but if the student is somehow able to maintain good academic standing and progress toward graduation without that literacy deficiency being addressed.
Illiteracy doesn't mean stupid. Equating reading ability with intelligence is ignorant. There are also varying degrees of illiteracy, making the concept contextual. The threshold for "functional illiteracy" is fuzzy, and how to gauge reading and writing proficiency to be at the "college-ready" level is, itself, a matter of discussion; though many articles seem to consistently set the bar for "at-risk" around 8th grade equivalency. (I'm sure that will be disputed by some, but that's tangential to this article.)
For a couple of years after she'd left the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes (ASPSA) at UNC, Mary Willingham began trying to raise awareness within the University of what she saw as a rot in the education of those student-athletes who were deemed academically at-risk. Hidden behind the softer-toned "at risk" term was an ugly reality which, she claimed, made it impossible to educate these students on a collegiate level precisely because of their reading and writing deficiencies. Either such students needed remedial help first before embarking on a UNC-grade curriculum; or, if that wasn't going to be provided, then they shouldn't be admitted.
It appears that around 2013, she started citing some findings she had somehow derived from analysis of UNC's own test data of identified "at-risk" students, providing metrics on grade-equivalency reading proficiency. How she calculated these levels, she has yet to explain; however, her goal was to increase the heat on an administration and faculty she felt was ignoring the issue, particularly in the context of Universities half-measure studies and investigations about curriculum irregularities that she felt were inadequate or had ulterior agendas. (Critics say she sought the spotlight and failed to give her colleagues and the University a chance to work the issues she was raising.)
I'm the first to charge Willingham with resorting to hyperbole and being a less-than careful researcher. And when Sara Ganim's CNN report in January 2014 hit the airwaves and Internet, and a firestorm ensued, I was, at first, on the University's side, feeling she had been leveraged by CNN's outrage journalism.
She wasn't merely talking about student-athletes not being ready for college-level work anymore. Now she was saying to the public that athletes at UNC couldn't read.
Had Willingham and Ganim gone too far? Had they embarrassed and disparaged Tar Heel student-athletes and impugned the University with such language. Saying the school "might as well have gone...to Glendale Elementary and let all the 4th graders in here-- 3rd graders" she titillated the public's appetite for scandal and delivered to UNC a rhetorical gut shot. Ganim's reporting didn't discriminate between the minority of student-athletes Willingham's findings described and the entire student-body of athletes at UNC.
The reaction was swift, with the University's Vice Chancellor and Provost denouncing the report as a travesty, and Coaching the Mind launching as Willingham's harshest critic. The University sought to refute the claims by contracting with third-party experts to review her data in an attempt to prove Willingham's analysis was grossly overstated and lacking merit.
What was so egregious about her claims?
She said she'd assessed the test results of 183 freshman student-athletes who'd been required to complete the freshman Basic Writing course from 2004 to 2012, and found 60% of them had reading proficiency levels of 4th-8th grade equivalent or below. And that 8-10% of that same group were as low or lower than 3rd grade readers, i.e. effectively functionally illiterate.
Outrageous-sounding, no? But why? Was it really so unbelievable?
Much of the calumny comes from misunderstanding what Willingham was saying; and that was in no small part thanks to Willingham's own silence on the matter, failing to correct media misinterpretations of her claims, not to mention her own exaggerations of the extent of the problem.
Often missed is that Willingham wasn't saying 60% of UNC student-athletes were not college-ready readers. She was saying 60% of a small subset of UNC student-athletes had reading disadvantages, and that small subset group was specifically comprised of admitted student-athletes identified as "at risk" academically. No inferences regarding the entire student-athlete population can or should be made from what could be found in that small, non-random sampling The 60% was descriptive only of that specific sample group.
The same is true of the 8-10% finding of 3rd grade or below non-readers.
Just to the sake of argument, let's imagine Mary's percentages were right or close to right; how many would she have been talking about?
She claimed to have relied on test data of 183 student-athletes who had been assigned to ENG 100 (ENG 10) from 2004 to 2012; a nine-year period. Take 60% of that and that's 110 student-athletes with assessed reading level of 8th grade or below. Across 9 years, that's 12 per year.
Doing the same thing for her 8-10% of claimed "functionally illiterate" and you get 1-2 per year.
Now, let's overlay those new "literacy" categories over the previous diagram from Part 1:
The only change from the previous diagram is the addition of Mary Willingham's 60% and 8-10% groupings. Willingham's percentages, when converted to raw numbers, do not exceed the "committee case" totals and cannot be translated to include anyone not admitted "at risk."
It paints the same picture as depicted previously, but now with the granularity of an "illiterate" subset, which could only possibly reflect negatively on a handful of student-athletes each year, but who aren't personally disparaged because their identities are protected by privacy laws.
Yet the University and Bethel chose to react as if all of student-athletes had been disparaged. UNC's own response in the wake of the CNN report cited figures of all student-athletes in contrast, as if Willingham's numbers were inferential.
Bethel and Co. have missed the forest for the trees. Their response to Willingham was probably more an emotional, visceral reaction; one that continues to convince itself that it is motivated in defense against the insult toward student-athletes, but which more likely comes from the sting of the indictment against UNC's academic support, admissions standards, faculty teaching quality, administrative oversight, and the suggestion of athletic exploitation of those failures for the purposes of maintaining student-athlete eligibility.
While carrying the banner for the supposedly disparaged, they've failed to allow that Mary Willingham's underlying message was true. Bethel's own cautionary email to the new Chancellor spoke to the same concern regarding admission of student-athletes not adequately prepared to succeed at UNC.
Were a couple of incoming students in each year's pool of liberally admitted student-athletes functionally illiterate? Does it really matter whether not they were or not, technically speaking? Would it have been all that surprising, given the numbers of special admits and the extreme lows that some of their admissions scores revealed (i.e. low and even sub-300 verbal scores)? Willingham very easily could be wrong in her precision, but it's hardly the travesty Bethel and UNC have made it out to be. It's not only feasible, but likely that some functionally illiterate "non-readers" were coddled through the system during the 2004-2012 time frame; yet they've used the outrage over such a notion as a red herring, seeking to discredit Willingham's message of a systematic ill at UNC. This, along with charges of ethics violations, character flaws and other classic character assassination and anti-whistleblower tactics, are geared to distract from how the University, itself, failed to respond until called on the carpet and then attempted to minimize the damage and restrict the guilt, all while patting itself on the back for its reforms and Moving Forward.
I'm no fan of Mary Willingham, though I won't recount the reasons why, here and now. That should have no bearing on interpreting the message she was conveying. Admitting students too under-prepared for college-level work without also addressing that capability gap before permitting them to pursue their "special talent" specialty, is THE recipe for the sort of scandalous academic malfeasance that transpired at UNC. Literacy was never the real issue.
