In January 2014, in CNN's report with Sara Ganim, Mary Willingham said UNC "...might as well have gone...to Glenwood Elementary and let all the 4th graders in here-- 3rd graders."
About five months earlier, in an email to then-new UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt, Bradley Bethel wrote, “...many student-athletes who were specially admitted whose academic preparedness is so low they cannot succeed here.”
Though both Willingham and Bethel appear to have been arguing the same point, the response from the University to each was decidedly different. Ignoring the behind-the-scenes background interchanges that wouldn't become public until this past year, the principle reason for the delta in University responses can probably be boiled down to three; each which Bethel has at various times articulated:
1. One obvious difference between these two is that Willingham's statement was hyperbole and could be (and was) perceived by many in the UNC community as disparaging of student-athletes. Broadcast in a very public manner and on a national media platform, many UNC partisans interpreted her statement as saying those types of student-athletes shouldn't have been admitted to UNC and took extreme exception. Sara Ganim also mistakenly articulated Willingham's claim in her re-phrasing, and Willingham, herself, failed to correct the mistake. The outrage over the CNN report came mainly from this misunderstanding of Willingham's findings, as evidenced by the University's official response. The University also felt strongly enough that her study was in error that it contracted with three outsider reviewers to perform an analysis of data that Willingham used to see if they could replicate her findings. (The merits of this task order that scoped these independent review are contested, but the objective of this article is not to belabor that aspect.)
Though Bethel, in his email to Folt, had challenged admissions of some UNC student-athletes as Willingham did, Bethel's statement, by comparison, was an internal communication, addressing what he felt was an overly relaxed approach to assessing student-athletes for their ability to succeed at Carolina. When his email became public, no UNC advocates objected to it or felt he'd disparaged any student-athletes, even though he was calling for a narrowing of admissions for some student-athletes. To her detractors, it was Willingham, not Bethel, who was, in effect, saying those academically unprepared student-athetes shouldn't have been admitted.
2. Bethel has also drawn a distinction between what he considered academically under-prepared and the measure by which Willingham had gauged academic preparedness. His was a benchmark of preparedness "for UNC" and not college in general, whereas Willingham's, according to him, was a much lower, unsubstantiated and insulting assessment based on a single factor of literacy. Willingham, of course, was only using literacy as a supporting argument, but Bethel has strenuously objected to claims that student-athletes at UNC possessed the reading deficiencies on the order of what Willingham was claiming. From Bethel's blog, Coaching the Mind:
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| Coaching the Mind, February 2014 |
3. Additionally, Bethel claimed his concerns were ameliorated by the administration's assurance that, starting with that class matriculating in the Fall of 2013, reforms involving stricter criteria for special talent sub-committee admission reviews were addressing the issue.
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| Coaching the Mind February 2014 |
By contrast, Willingham in 2014 was still posturing as if the University had not responded adequately to address the root causes for the academic challenges that faced this subset of UNC student-athletes.
I think those are all accurate distinctions between how Mary Willingham and Bradley Bethel went about making what I believe was fundamentally the same point. Willingham went for the jugular in apparent frustration with UNC's lack of action and wound up appearing to insult the very student-athletes for whom she was claiming to advocate. Bethel's approach was non-antagonistic, which may explain why saying X number of student-athletes shouldn't have been admitted to UNC wasn't also viewed as disparaging to those student-athletes. Plus, he was sated to see the number of "committee cases" reduced by as many a dozen or so in a year after reforms were implemented. Willingham did not feel the core issue had been addressed.
But consider this: regardless of whether or not Willingham and Bethel would agree on how to measure and characterize those student-athletes who were "not academically prepared" for UNC-level coursework, or whether or not the University had adequately addressed the issue, I propose both were referring to the same cadre of student-athletes.
After a couple of years of trying to communicate her concern to UNC faculty leadership, counseling staff and administration, Willingham decided to try applying an objective measure to illustrate her call to the University about the gulf between the supposed mission of the university to educate student-athlete and the pressure to get academically challenged student-athletes to merely survive the curriculum. So, by 2013, she began to promote her claim of finding that 68-70% of a group of 182 (or 183?) student-athletes between 2004 and 2012 had reading proficiency too low for college-level work; specifically 60% with 4th to 8th grade equivalency and another 8-10% 3rd grade or below. Right or wrong, that is specific.
Bradley Bethel refuted those figures;
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| Coaching the Mind March 2014 |
Bethel's email to Chancellor Folt in that same year (2013) was subjective and non-specific. Though he vigorously contests Willingham's literacy findings stated above, he's never (as far as I've seen) offered any amplifying substantiation for his own ambiguous "many" or what constituted "academic preparedness too low" to succeed at UNC.
Perhaps Bradley could explain how he identified “...many student-athletes who were specially admitted whose academic preparedness is so low they cannot succeed here,” when there had been little or even no evidence of those student-athletes not succeeding. Success as measured by remaining on graduation track, having passing grades and remaining eligible for competition were supposed to be the envy of Division I athletics. During that 2004-2012 time frame, including the latter couple of years after Bethel's hire, there'd been a remarkable lack of academic eligibility casualties, and UNC's gaudy Academic Progress Rates (APR) and Graduation Success Rates (GSR) were often cited with pride. I believe that to have been Willingham's prime point: how were these unprepared student-athletes "succeeding?" Were they really?
This -- not specific literacy figures -- is, and always has been, the real heart of the issue, despite Bethel and the University administration's attempt to fixate on the precision of the metric Willingham used to make her point. Regardless of the accuracy of the reading-equivalency measurement, Willingham's concern wasn't simply that academically ill-equipped student-athletes were being admitted. That was Bethel's focus. Rather, her plank was that if the university was going to admit students with such academic hurdles to overcome, it had an obligation to attend to those academic deficiencies first rather than erect a "system" and "shadow curriculum" to allow those student-athletes to play sports while appearing to succeed. Bethel didn't -- and still doesn't -- believe there was ever any "system" erected for the purpose of simply gaining passage of student-athletes with academic deficiencies through the curriculum. Neverthless, he was somehow aware enough that some degree of student-athlete academic deficiency existed to communicate his concern to the new Chancellor.
My proposal in squaring these two, apparently opposed views of Willingham and Bethel is that by whatever measure each may have been applying, Willingham and Bethel were both referencing the same group of student-athletes. I intend to explore this next.
