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| Bradley Bethel with Beth Bridger in "Unverified" |
I recently came across a link to a March 2011 article posted at InsideHigherEd.com that I hadn't remembered bookmarking. It was an editorial by Bethel responding to University of Oklahoma professor and former president of the Drake Group, Gerald Gurney, who had previously written an article, calling on the NCAA to toughen initial eligibility academic standards for freshmen student-athletes.
In The Wrong Approach on NCAA Rules, Bethel disagreed with Gurney on the issue of admissions standards for student-athletes. It was written by Bethel in early 2011 when he was a learrning specialist for Ohio State University and still six months away from starting his work for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Though disagreeing on just one possible solution Gurney was proposing, Bethel did agree with Gurney on some points:
"In college athletics, eligibility is often emphasized over student development. Consequently, coaches and support staff may be tempted to engage in academic misconduct to keep underprepared athletes eligible."
And later in the article, Bethel admits:
"When athletes are dictated which classes to take and when, as happens often, they become increasingly disengaged from academics, learning becomes all the more difficult, especially for the most underprepared. If there is a systemic problem of academic misconduct, it is not because too many underprepared athletes are admitted to college. It is because our institutions give these athletes the impression that classes are no more than hoops to jump through — the easier the jump, the better."At the time when Gurney and Bethel wrote those commentaries, the "academic scandal" at UNC was thought to be limited to issues about the misconduct of a tutor to football players. The public had yet to know anything about "paper classes" or "AFAM." Mary Willingham hadn't yet become notorious as a "whistleblower" in the UNC academic scandal story, nor had she yet become persona non grata within the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes (ASPSA) at UNC.
In fact, at that point in early 2011, Dr. Julius Nyang'oro was still inclined to offer lecture classes delivered as ersatz "independent studies." The last "paper class," which UNC would later identify in several ever-expanding reviews of the African and African-American (AFAM) studies department, had yet to be offered. That would come later that Summer 2011 when 19 football players would be enrolled in the "irregular" course AFAM 280: Blacks in North Carolina.
Six months after his InsideHigherEd commentary, Bethel had left Ohio State University and joined the academic advising staff for student-athletes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When Bethel arrived for his first academic term at UNC, the university had just begun an internal investigation of Dr. Nyang'oro and the AFAM curriculum, having been alerted by media inquiries into "irregularities" in some prior AFAM course offerings in which athletes had been enrolled.
Nearly two years later, Bethel emailed incoming Chancellor, Carol Folt, writing “...many student-athletes who were specially admitted whose academic preparedness is so low they cannot succeed here.”
I've always been curious by what measure Bethel had determined any student-athletes were not able to succeed at UNC. During his two years there, I don't believe UNC had suffered any academic casualties; at least not in the revenue sports, which had encompassed the great majority of "specially admitted" students. Even before Bethel's time, UNC had had remarkable success keeping those "specially admitted" student-athletes in good academic standing and progressing toward degrees. What was it that had prompted Bethel to communicate his concerns to the new Chancellor?
When the 2013 email from Bethel to Folt became public, Bethel blogged about how he had been advised not to use the terminology of "underprepared" but rather “students with special talents,” which he recognized was but a euphemism. But he also explained that his concerns at the time were ameliorated by UNC-CH Provost James W. Dean, who had assured him that UNC had addressed the issue, reducing the numer of special talent policy admissions that required faculty review. Though Bethel tirelessly defends the athletics department from having any culbability in the scandal, he has stated that recruiting and requesting too many "faculty review" cases for admissions contributed to the problem, though he also reminded us all that the responsibility ultimately rested with the faculty members who reviewed and recommended those admission decisions.
His stance while a UNC learning specialist stands in rather stark contrast to his 2011 stance when he was an Ohio State learning specialist rebutting Gerald Gurney. In 2011, he defended NCAA policies allowing admission of academically challenged student-athletes, but admitted that the temptation to "engage in academic misconduct to keep underprepared athletes eligible" was real and something against which the institution must guade.
By 2014, he was rationalizing his satisfaction with UNC's more restrictive admissions policies of academically challenged student-athletes, while at the same time enaging in a campaign to refute charges that ASPSA counselors had been "eligibility brokers" or had been complicit in the scandal for the very sort of "systematic problem" he conceded could be tempting if classes are treated as "no more than hoops to jump through."
Maybe there's some nuance I'm missing, but Bethel in early 2011 sounds a lot like Mary Willingham in 2014 (albeit, without Willingham's sound bite hyperbole). Maybe Bethel's problem with Willingham was he saw her protests of UNC as "disparaging" student-athletes and it was that that put him on tilt, leading him to see trees rather than forest.
But it was Willingham, not Bethel, who had argued that if the University was going to admit these academically challenged student-athletes, it ought to be obligated not to treat education as, as Bethel called it, jumping through hoops.
It was Bethel, not Willingham, who was satisfied by the University's tightened admissions policies and it is Bethel who defends the conduct of "his colleagues" who exploited the University's academic failures, turning classes into "hoops to jump through."
What a difference those two years in Chapel Hill, from 2012 to 2014, must have made.
