Sunday, February 28, 2016

A Story in Pictures







Johnson & Willingham Poster Presentation at CSRI Conference
April 18th, 2013




Minutes from 1/17/2014 Faculty Council Meeting
http://facultygov.unc.edu/faculty-council/meeting-materials-past-years/meeting-materials-2013-2014/january-17-2014/




 UNC leaders say Mary Willingham's claims on athletes' academics 'a travesty'
17 January 2014 N&O article
by Dan Kane & Jane Stancill





Dan Kane contacts Dr. Johnson



Johnson turns to Mary Willingham



Willingham responds to Johnson



Johnson's reaction to Willingham



Willingham's expresses regret?



Johnson's final comment to Willingham



Johnson decides to respond to Dan Kane



Kane points things how he got her name



Johnson's last word





Willingham on Kane: a month later

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Why Did UNC Terminate Dr. Johnson's Contract?

This page is a crowd-sourced, living document and will be updated as information is discovered.  Inputs are welcome, but should be accompanied by a reference or exhibit. 

This page was last updated on 3/9/2016


Introduction

Depending on which side of the scandal aisle one sits, different reasons are proffered for why Cognitive Neuropsychology PLLC (Dr. Lyn Johnson) had her contract abruptly terminated in late July 2013.

Theory 1: Retaliation for Research Message 
Argument: Dr. Lyn Johnson had partnered with Mary Willingham to perform a study and analysis of the incidence of Learning Disabilities (LD)/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in collegiate student-athletes; and it was shortly after the attention drawn by the briefing at an April 2013 College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) Conference in Chapel Hill that school officials retaliated against Willingham and Johnson, either due to the unwanted exposure of high LD/ADHD rates at UNC or due to Willingham's derivative claims from the study about literacy levels among revenue-sport student-athletes. (Other potential irritants to UNC may have been recent negative publicity from her contributions to News & Observer articles and her award by the Drake Group of the Hutchinson Award.)

Theory 2: Breach of Student Privacy Protections
Argument: The revelation, as evidenced by the April 2013 CSRI "poster brief" that Johnson and Willingham were improperly accessing and utilizing primary, identifiable human-subject data and thus violating privacy protections of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and/or Institutional Review Board (IRB) governing regulations (45 CFR 46), led to personnel personnel actions against Willingham and termination of Johnson's contract.

Theory 3: Reevaluation and Process Improvement
Argument: UNC had begun reevaluating it's educational and psychological testing of student-athletes in 2012 or earlier, originating from concerns forwarded by the University's Learning Disability Services (LDS) and/or the athletic department's sports medicine staff about the screening methods in place producing extraordinarily high, and possibly flawed, LD/ADHD results. As a result of a year or more of evaluation, the university ultimately made a change in both process and service provider prior to screening incoming student-athletes in Fall 2013. This decision was unrelated to anything associated with Willingham/Johnson's study.

Objective:
The answer as to which theory is correct is not stated explicitly in any public document or statement found to date. In an attempt to assess which theory is more likely, the following is an evidence-based timeline which, it is hoped, will provide illumination as to the University's motives and actions during the Summer of 2013 with regard to Willingham and Johnson.


2007


January 9th, 2007

  • Tom Gualtieri emails John Blanchard about a pilot LD/ADHD screening project, conducted with Mary Willingham and Dr. Lyn Johnson. The screening results of all incoming 2005 and 2006 football student-athletes and all 2006 women's basketball would become the basis of Willingham and Johnson's "Incidence of LD/ADHD in Collegiate Sport Athletes" study. (item contributed by Bluedevilicious.com)

  • Gualtieri and Johnson had previously published Reliability and Validity of a Computerized Neurocognitive test battery called CNS Vital Signs (CNSVS) in October 2006, which is what served as the group screening tool in the pilot study above. Gualtieri was a psychology faculty member at UNC for 11 years and is founder and medical director of North Carolina Neuropsychiatry Clinics in Chapel Hill and Charlotte He is the developer of CNSVS. Johnson's Cognitive Neuropsychology of Chapel Hill utilizes the CNSVS screening method. 
  • This process, along with use of the computerized screening tool ImPACT, would also be adopted by the athletic department/ASPSA to screen all first-year scholarship student-athletes enrolled in Summer Session II terms from 2008 to 2012 (5 years), which would include all freshman on the football, men's and women's basketball and also baseball teams. This process would change Summer of 2013 as seen below. 

2008

March 25th, 2008
May 16th, 2008


2009

2010
January 2010
  • Mary Willingham resigns from her position as Learning Specialist for the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes (ASPSA) and becomes associate director of the Center for Student Success and Academic Counseling (CSSAC), serving under the director, Harold Woodard. 
  • She continues to be involved with the study of the incidence of LD/ADHD in college athletes, tracking academic progress and success of those identified. 

2011
  • No developments, events or communications pertinent to the subject yet uncovered from this CY.

2012
Feb/Mar 2012


May 8th, 2012
July 1st, 2012 

2013
March 14th, 2013

April 2nd-4th, 2013
  • A special committee of the Southern Association of Colleges & Schools, Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) visits UNC and meets with school officials, during which they are told the problems were confined to "the unethical actions by two people," Dr. Julius Nyang'oro and Debbi Crowder. 
April 18th, 2013
  • News & Observer's publishes Andew Carter article in which Mary Willingham is quoted alleging NCAA infractions and saying "I lied. I saw it."
  • Mary Willingham is presented with the Drake Group's Hutchins Award.
  • CSRI Conference held at Chapel Hill. Here is an image of "poster brief" abstract by Mary Willingham and Dr. Lyn Johnson.
  • Beth Lyons forwards the abstract of Willingham's and Johnson's report being presented at the CSRI conference to Jenn Townsend.
  • More from the CSRI Conference. This is the segment from the "poster brief" that Bradley Bethel would later say raised his and other Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes (ASPSA) staffers' eyebrows since it indicated Willingham was accessing and exploiting educational records that she should not have since leaving her ASPSA position in January 2010.
According Bethel in April 2014 Blog 

  • Beth Lyons invites Jenn Townsend to meet with candidate psychologist Dennis Steil.
  • News & Observer's publishes Andrew Carter article, [archived here] quoting comments Mary Willingham made in her speech during presentation of the Hutchins Award.  
April 19th, 2013
April 24th, 2013
May 1st, 2013
May 21st, 2013
June 3rd-5th, 2013
  • Email chain between Chapel Hill psychologists Jen Younstrom and Beth Lyons and Jenn Townsend, cc'ing Michelle Brown, setting up interview for testing of student-athletes before Fall 2013.
  • Beth Lyons reports to Michelle Brown on talks with other psychologists about improvements to LD/ADHD screening and full-battery testing processes.
June 24th, 2013
  • UNC's Institutional Review Board (IRB) renews determination that Willingham and Johnson's study does not require IRB Approval (based on faulty submission testifying that the study protocol does not include primary data on human subjects). Review was in response to addition of Dr. Jay Smith as a secondary investigator. (Link to full timeline and records)
June 2013 (date undetermined)
  • After three and half years in the position of assistant director of the Center for Student Academic Excellence (CSSCA) and reassigned by CSSCA director Harold Woodard as Graduate Studies counselor. 
July 8th, 2013
July 18th, 2013
July 19th, 2013


July 23rd-24th, 2013


July 31st, 2013
  • Requisition Change Order to "liquidate and finalize all funds for standing order W400338; will be using a different vendor for this service for FY13-14," formally ending UNC's contract with Cognitive Neuropsychology and Dr. Lyn Johnson. (item contributed by Bluedevilicious.com)
August 28th, 2013
  • Mary Willingham emails Lissa Broome about her concerns, similar to earlier email to July 18th email to the Provost. Broome's copies working group: James W. Dean, Bubba Cunningham, Vince Ille, Debbi Clarke, Michelle Brown and Stephen Farmer on her reply.
September 4th, 2013
  • Amy Kleissler sends this note to Willingham (with emphasis added):
Mary
I began to compose this email to you in order to touch base with you about [personal detail], but after hearing Frank DeFord's profile of you this morning I had to re-title my email :)
I've been carrying around a lump in my throat for nearly a year over the hypocrisy that is our old office, and hearing Frank's final comment about you, that you still love the university, made me finally break for it is precisely how I feel.
I will admit that I have not had the courage and stomach to speak out so publicly the way you have done. For all the disappointment, disillusionment, and grief I feel over all the crap that has transpired, I cannot begin to fathom the degree to which others have forced these feelings on you. For that I am very sorry and wish I could have supported you more somehow. Plenty of people suffer unjust personal and professional disappointment or criticism, but it somehow feels that it cuts more deeply when you love what you do and believe with all your heart and experience that you are doing honorable work. Sometimes I wish I had never come forward with what I heard and saw, that I had not been so foolish as to believe that at its heart academic support was an honorable endeavor, and that I hadn't trusted that if I backed up what my department told me that they would back me in return. You could write the book on that! I could provide the anecdotes :) Hang in there and keep swinging.
Best
Amy 
November 13th, 2013
  • UNC's Institutional Review Board (IRB) renews determination that Willingham and Johnson's study does not require IRB Approval (based on same faulty submission as before, testifying that the study protocol does not include primary data on human subjects). Review was in response to modification to study's data analysis.
December 10th, 2013

2014
January 7th, 2014

January 13th, 2014
January 16th, 2014
February 21st, 2014
  • UNC-CH Chancellor and UNC system President Tom Ross announce the hiring of an independent investigator to look more deeply into the academic irregularities of the African and African-American Studies department at UNC-CH. The impetus for the investigation is the dropping of charges against Dr. Julius Nyang'oro and his willingness, and that of former department administrative assistant Debbie Crowder, to cooperate with investigators.
April 10th, 2014
  • UNC responds to Dan Kane's public records request for information on termination of Dr. Lyn Johnson's contract. Regina Stabile cites final requisition order to "liquidate and finalize all funds for standing order W400338; will be using a different vendor for this service for FY13-14," and stating there are no other records responsive to Kane's request
April 11th, 2014
April 14th, 2014
  • Bradley Bethel responds to the April 11th Kane article in his Coaching the Mind blog post "SATA-gate" article, recounting his version of events from the Willingham and Johnson CSRI "poster presentation" and Johnson's contract termination.
April 21st, 2014
May 15th, 2014
  • Daily Tarheel reports about Willingham's IRB application discrepancies. 
May 16th, 2014
June 30th, 2014
October 22nd, 2014
November 19th, 2014
  • In the wake of the Wainstein Report, SACSCOC requests updated information from UNC-CH, including the statement that "In at least two instances, people who were interviewed by [SACS special committee] appear to have had some prior concerns and/or knowledge of abnormal activity..." (excerpted)
  • The "two instances" cited by SACS were deduced to have been Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Bobbi Owen, and the Director of the Center for Student Success and Academic Counseling (CSSAC) Dr. Harold Woodard.
  • Woodward, at the time of the special committee visit and review in April 2013, was Mary Willingham's boss. He who would demote her from her position as associate director sometime during summer months following.

Conclusions

As of 3/8/2016, it is still too premature to assess the documentary evidence in order to test the three theories stated above.

But to date, the only information suggesting privacy concerns played a role in Willingham's demotion and Johnson's termination has come from Bradley Bethel, who has asserted his knowledge that Johnson's mishandling of student educational data was, or might have been, a contributing factor. Though University privacy concerns have not been evidenced in the records yet, as a former insider during the time in question, his testimony should be entered here:

February 23rd, 2016
  • Bradley Bethel testifies to dual reasons, from his experience as as former-learning specialist on the ASPSA staff in 2013, as to why Johnson's contract was terminated: In an article on Coaching the Mind, he states:
    • "concerns for rates of ADHD/LD diagnoses"
    • "advocating for use of new psychologist"
    • "we stopped contracting Johnson, after we had concerns she and Willingham had not conducted research properly."
    • outside opinions "confirmed what I had suspected, that the methods Johnson was using were in some ways inadequate."

    • "When UNC learned that the psychologists' methods  were, to an extent, inadequate, UNC stopped working with her."







Sunday, February 14, 2016

Between 60% and "Many" (Part 2)

This is part 2 of a 2-part article. Part 1 can be found here.

In my last blog post, I posed that, whether or not they would agree on how to measure and characterize those student-athletes admitted who were "not-prepared" for UNC-level coursework, both Willingham and Bethel were referring to the same cadre of student-athletes with their concerns.

If you strip away or can ignore Willingham's indelicacy and tendency toward hyperbole, or even the flaws in her analysis that led to her literacy claims, we can deduce that Willingham and Bethel were essentially saying the same thing. By whatever ruler each was using, or however it was each chose to express it, both were concerned about the academic challenge of educating and counseling a particular subset of student-athletes admitted to UNC.

If you convert Willingham's percentages to an absolute number, you can calculate from her claims of 68-70% with reading levels at 8th grade level or below that she was referencing approximately 123-125 total student-athletes over a 9-year period from 2004-2012. (68-70% of 182 or 183.) Since this number had come from a non-random, specific pool of students, already segregated and identified by UNC as being academically "at-risk" upon admission, Willingham's claimed literacy percentages can only be understood as descriptive only of that pool of "at-risk" student-athletes, and not inferential to any other student-athletes not a part of that sub-set as CNN's Ganim, Bradley Bethel and the University itself interpreted it.

Specifically, if Willingham's numbers were assumed to be correct: over a 9-year period, from 2004 to 2012, UNC would have had around 13 reading-challenged student-athletes at UNC per year.  That's it. No other student-athletes literacy was implicated. It was just 13 revenue sport (football, men's and women's basketball) student-athletes out of a specific, academically "at-risk" population.

Is this "around 13" per year the same as the "many" in Bethel's email to the new Chancellor? Regardless of just what he meant by academically ill-prepared, how many were the "many" Bethel was talking about?

I think one way to extrapolate a specific number from Bethel's non-specific descriptor is to examine the effect of admissions reforms that answered Bethel's emailed concern. Here are the committee case totals from 2006-2012 -- along with the estimates for 2004 and 2005 estimated -- gathered from UNC's public records, showing an average of 23-24 per year during same period covered by Willingham's claim:




It's logical that Bethel's "many" would come from the approximately 212 committee cases between 2004 and 2012. We know Willingham's data set came from 182-183 cases, drawn from enrollments in freshman Basic Writing, which itself was a subset of what academic counselors dubbed "at risk."

Recall, Bethel's own words corroborate this approximate range per annum:
Coaching the Mind March 2014


The following figure illustrates how all 212 or so of  "committee cases" (Set C) and all 182 or so of "Willingham's test group" (Set M) nest within the sets of incoming student-athletes required to take  ENG10/100 Basic Writing and the academically "at risk" student-athletes, as defined by ASPSA.




What we don't know (and can't without UNC's cooperation, which could happen if UNC was willing to de-identify the records) is how much of Mary's data set (Set M) intersects with the University's committee cases (Set C) of concern to Bethel. It stands to reason that there'd be a very large overlap, possibly even close to 90-100%. (The figure above makes no attempt to illustrate the degree of overlap and is drawn only for conceptual purposes.)

The post-2013 special-talent committee reforms that had sated Bethel resulted in a reduction of 10-12 special talent admissions requiring committee review per year. Compare that to Willingham's 13/year figure calculated above. If we constructively apply that effect of reform backwards through 2004-2012, we'd get 90-120 student-athletes. If that equates to Bethel's "many", it lines up closely with Willingham's 123-125. 

Unlike Bethel, Willingham was campaigning not simply for restricting admission, but for prioritizing the educational needs of those students above the pressing need for their athletic skills. Bethel has never agreed those were out of balance or that there was ever any pressure from athletics. Any systematic deficiency, according to Bethel, rested with the educators in the College and not from pressures of athletic interests.

Maybe UNC's admissions reforms have answered the bell, and Willingham - by whatever measure she'd been using - would not find functionally illiterate student-athletes at UNC anymore. But literacy was never the real issue. Willingham's clarion call was for a proper alignment of education with athletics, and the abandonment of academic decisions being made for athletic interests. Reforming special admission policies and procedures is only part of the remedy and doesn't address the issue of athletic interests influencing and corrupting academic goals and priorities. As far as I can tell, Bethel has never conceded that such an alignment shift was necessary or warranted, believing it was never askew. According to him, anything amiss was the fault of the College of Arts & Sciences; not the Athletics Department or the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes.

The University Provost called Willingham's literacy claims a "travesty."  Bethel wrote, "My case has been, and is still, that claiming 70% of men’s basketball and football players read below a high school level is unfair and insulting when the real number is much lower, probably less than 30%. "

Willingham's "70%" of 182 was only 125 total student-athletes, at most; or 12-13 per year. How many football and men's basketball players are admitted each year? 35? 40? Willingham's numbers included women's basketball too as a revenue sport. What's "probably less than 30%" of 40? Hey! There's that number again.

The "travesty" was never Willingham's claims about literacy. The University turned it into a travesty by the way it responded.



  


Friday, February 12, 2016

Between 60% and "Many" (Part 1)

This is part 1 of a 2-part article. Part 2 can be found here.

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:

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.

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;

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.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Revisiting Mandel Review of Unverified

This blog article was the third of three offering comment on Unverified: the Untold Story About the UNC Scandal. The first can be found here. The second is referenced below:

I'm anticipating a rebuttal soon to my comment on Aaron Mandel's article about Unverified. Bradley Bethel says that, while Mandel was in error regarding the characterization of Beth Bridger and Jaimie Lee as whistleblowers, his article was otherwise on point and that I'm misinformed.

Bethel's response to Mandel and promise of a rebuttal are intriguing to me since it sure sounds like Aaron watched a different film from what others, and Bethel himself, described.

He got Unverified's premise right: that the media's narrative is to "blame the athletics department," and that Kenneth Wainstein's investigation and UNC's response was to do the same thing. Where things get bizarre is Mandel's accompanying commentary that sounds exactly like the criticisms of UNC to which Coaching the Mind and Bethel have been resistant.

So while waiting for Bradley's retort, I tweeted some of these conflicting points, which I'll re-assemble here and add some additional comment, free of the Twitter character restriction. If he hasn't begun his rebuttal already, this will give him more grist for his mill.


Tweet #1



Comment:
The excerpted section in the Tweet above was taken from the closing section of Aaron Mandel's reaction to Unverified. I hesitated to call it a review since, had I not known he was referring to Unverified, I would have sworn his points were the antithesis of Unverified's message.

For instance, I read Mandel above as calling out UNC's systematic practice of putting student-athlete eligibility ahead of education. That's not Bethel's or Unverified's beef with UNC. To the contrary, Bethel has consistently argued that eligibility concerns played little or even no part in the scandal. He blames faculty and faculty leadership for the curriculum failure, but has always insisted that athletics and eligibility motivation did not drive that failure.

Yet Bethel doesn't contradict Mandel on this point, which I find quite curious. I can't wait to find out how this is reconciled.




Tweet #2




Comment:
Mandel says -- and I agree -- that the sort of academic shenanigans in which UNC engaged wasn't "help," but rather "facilitating elite power structures."

Is Bethel saying that point stands too?

The excerpt attached to the tweet above is from Bethel's editorialized "exam" in November 2014, shortly after Kenneth Wainstein issued his report. Bethel was commenting on what he charged was media critics misinterpretation of, or reading misinformation into, the Report. The question as posed and answered sought to distance Crowder's motives for offering the paper classes from having anything to do with coddling student-athletes for athletic interests.

I'll hold off on the accuracy of Bethel's proposed answer for later (Tweet #5 below), but here we see how Bethel has tried to mitigate criticism of the paper class system as being athletically-driven by citing a "helping" motivation; but Mandel, himself, clearly discounts that brand of "helping?"

I'd like to see Mandel and Bethel discuss this and see how they can come to a meeting of minds. I'd like to believe Mandel wouldn't buy Bethel's argument that that sort of action is "helping" in anyway other than to help students stay academically alive even if such help bereft of academic merit.


Tweet #3



Comment:
Here's more about this notion of "help:" It wasn't just Crowder who was guilty of misguided "help." The two central characters of Unverified, presented as sympathetic scapegoats, were responsible for the Powerpoint slide above, which unequivocally shows one of the ways academic counselors to student-athletes were "helping" by promoting the academic largesse of those friendly faculty and staff members who, themselves, were only trying to "help."

In the film (or at least in the trailer to the film), Lee invokes sympathy using that same argument:
"I was just an academic counselor. I'm just trying to help students figure out how to get through college."
"Get through college?" How is that any different from the criticized behavior of pre-collegiate educational systems that pump students through to graduation, yet leaving them ill-prepared for college? It's the identical "help" mentality that isn't really helping. That kind of help is not educating. It's not remediation. How can Mandel on one hand criticize such misguided "help" and yet view the UNC counselors "just trying to help" as sympathetic? Is my confusion based on misinformation?


Tweet #4



Comment:
Here, again, is the excerpt from Mandel's Unverified article, Just who is he chiding for failing to perform "Rigorous tutoring? Remedial reading? A year away from sports to focus on their academics?" Who's job was that if not the organization for which the Unverified scapegoats worked? Is he really agreeing with what Bethel and Unverified seem to be saying: that the onus for those functions falls only on faculty, faculty oversight and administration?

Not coaches? Not athletic directors? Not athletic department staffers?

Not even the academic support program for student-athletes?


Tweet #5



Comment:
As mentioned earlier, Coaching the Mind sought to educate misinformed or lazy journalists and critics about what the Wainstein Report communicated by presenting a focused exam of sorts. One of his goals was to counter the student-athlete eligibility motive which he deemed a "narrative" of the media; and instead emphasize Crowder's claimed compassion to help struggling students as her primary motivation for offering the paper classes to dispute the media's emphasis on student-athlete eligibility motivation.

But what Coaching the Mind didn't show was the additional factors Wainstein offered, such as #2 from pg 44 of the Report:

This love and passion for Chapel Hill athletics cannot be swept under the rug, since it is the corrupting influence at the root of the scandal. Since when did being "passionate about helping struggling students" corrupt an educational system? Everyone with a role in creating, perpetuating or ignoring the situation where a number of student-athletes could find themselves struggling and needing such help had, at her or his core, a love for or affinity with Chapel Hill athletics. Is it any surprise they all wanted to lend their "help?"


Tweet 6-8



Comment:
A mistake  made by Unverified supporters (either intentionally or ignorantly), in their contrarian stance to critics of UNC, is that when we critics stump for accountability from the athletics department, we're somehow trying to get faculty or administrative leadership off the hook. That's false.

Critics, like me, hold the institution, as a whole, accountable; which means all contributing parties, including -- not instead of -- faculty and deans. We agree that faculty and faculty leadership failed: not just a few "rogue" faculty/staff or negligent deans. Faculty responsibility also rests with the Faculty Athletics Council. the Faculty Athletics Representatives, the Faculty Subcommittees on Special Talent Admissions, Faculty Executive Councils, and Faculty in departments other than African and African-American Studies and the other schools outside of the Arts & Sciences.

The "paper class" mechanism may have been restricted to the AFAM department of the College of Arts and Sciences, but public release of internal communications show pervasive catering to athletic interest, "helping" student-athletes with excessive independent studies, favored registration, upper class course enrollment for "at-risk" 1st year student-athletes, grading and/or assignments coordinated with counselors, frequent core course substitutions, plagiarism and other honors violations tolerated, and overly "cozy" relationships with counselors.


None of these faculty outside of the AFAM department were included within the narrowed scope of the Wainstein investigation, but evidence is rife in the raw, redacted documents released post-Wainstein, giving off thick smoke that the "system" extended well beyond AFAM and took forms not limited to the sort of academic misconduct known as "paper classes."

But ownership for the scandal should also include athletics staff and the academic support program personnel. They are part of the institutional failure too. They weren't victims or mere passengers caught by an academic train wreck. Before Unverified went into production, Coaching the Mind had pointed the finger solely at the College of Arts and Sciences. Unverified was billed to be a castigation of the media for forcing an athletics-driven motive into the narrative. Thanks to an awakening during production, Unverified broadened its target to include the UNC administration for some perceived attempt to protect administrative and faculty leadership by scapegoating some peons who worked under a dotted-line organizational connection to the athletic department. Unverified essentially is charging UNC leadership with playing into this athletics-driven narrative so desired by the media.

The closest Bradley Bethel has come to blaming athletics is in saying athletic recruiting was lax for a time, with coaches presenting too many under-prepared recruits for special admissions consideration. But even that athletics recruitment failure, for him, rests mainly on the shoulders of the faculty-led special committee on Special Talents, which recommended admission for these at-risk student-athletes.

I did manage to goad Bradley into affirming that former ASPSA staffers Jan Boxill and Cynthia Reynolds should be accountable for their roles in the scandal and that their motives included athletic eligibility.


They do not get the sympathetic treatment Unverified gives Bridger and Lee.

At every turn, Bethel has sought to insulate the scandal from such athletic-driven motives as eligibility engineering, and to refute the responsibility of counselors in abetting a rogue curriculum. He staunchly insists it wasn't an "athletically-driven" scandal.

UNC coaches promise recruits' parents that their children will get a UNC-quality education. And coaches receive bonuses and incentives for hitting academic benchmarks based on students-athletes  remaining in academically good-standing and maintaining progress toward graduation. Those metrics practically encourage the sort of shenanigans discovered at UNC; but when we find out how the sausage was made, athletics staff and directors all suddenly turn into Captain Renault or Sgt Schultz and claim it's out of their "wheelhouse."

It's incongruous for Aaron Mandel to congratulate Unverified for pulling back the curtain, but describe a curtain that Unverified fails to pull back.

Mandel writes:


What larger goal? Isn't Unverified saying the crushing was done to save the academic higher-ups? Scapegoats are innocents that bear the sins of the guilty; but are Lee and Bridger really innocent? And who are the guilty shielded by Lee and Bridger taking the fall? Is the "larger goal" to which Mandel refers the same as what Unverified is saying is the reason for the scapegoating?

Who ARE those power brokers, anyway? And who or what is Unverified saying they are protecting?

Mandel's answer:

Is that Unverified's position too?

Mandel's overarching opinions are ones I can get behind; but they run contrary to what I believe is the message behind Unverified. So it's jarring to see Mandel appear to be endorsing Bethel -- and for Bethel to welcome the endorsement -- as if there's no disjunction.

It doesn't take a crazy conspiracy theorist to realize that the hands on the strings are the Trustees, so intertwined with the Rams Club that it barely merits referring to them separately. "Move Forward" faculty and South Building administrators are all willing accomplices and enablers to those who care so much for sustaining the legacy and identity of Tar Heel athletics that they're willing to:
  •  risk accreditation catastrophe, 
  •  pump millions of dollars into a public relations effort and legal defense, 
  •  assign culpability as long as they aren't associated with the athletic department (low-level counselors not included), 
  •  exploit any and every ruse to deflect media or NCAA attention from hurting recruiting, post-season competition or past championship legacies 
  • not to mention crushing the one individual who came the closest to the actual role of whistleblower; or, for that matter, anyone who isn't keen to "move forward, together" without acknowledging and addressing the athletic-motivated roots for the corruption.

It strains Occam's Razor to forward the preposterous notion that academic educators cooked up a system that didn't benefit themselves but benefited the sports programs they loved so much. And if UNC athletics boosters weren't "the elite power structure" to which Mandel refers, it might be the first time in collegiate sports history that an innocent, clean athletic program was tainted by its "elite power structure" academic staff and faculty.

Is it really the media's fault for not buying into that rather incredulous counter-narrative and going with one that makes sense?