Last week,
WRAL ran a story about UNC's settlement with Mary Willingham; and, in a background paragraph, provided a thumbnail synopsis of the Wainstein investigation that including this line:
"The fraud went on for 18 years, ending in 2011, and involved 169 athletes whose grades in such classes kept them eligible to compete in athletics."
Defenders of UNC picked up on the bolded "factoid," objecting that this was NOT what the Wainstein Report found.
The
Wainstein Report, itself, has been criticized from many in the pro-UNC corner for reaching conclusions and making pronouncements for which, they claim, there was no foundation. The defensive refrain is that Kenneth Wainstein forwarded a narrative in the Report that wasn't supported by the facts. (Since Wainstein was commissioned by UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt and UNC President Tom Ross, it's not clear to me whose narrative it was that Wainstein is supposed to have been promoting.)
To the followers and supporters of
Coaching the Mind -- and the anticipated
"Unverified" documentary -- the truth is distorted even further when reporters or pundits misrepresent, misstate or misinterpret facts from the Wainstein Report that aren't actually in the Report.
I anticipate that we'll soon see an article by
Bradley Bethel that either focuses on such claimed distortions, using the "misinterpretation" of Wainstein's 169 athletes figure (found on pg. 61 of the Wainstein Report) as an example. And technically, he'll be right. The Wainstein Report
does not specifically say that those 169 student-athletes would have been athletically ineligible were it not for the fraudulent paper classes. What it does say, precisely, is that 169 student-athletes would have had a recalculated cumulative Grade Point Average of under 2.0 were it not for the paper class grade. That statement does not necessarily correlate to athletic ineligible
as dictated by the NCAA.
Bethel and Co. have repeatedly insisted that, whatever UNC's sins were, they were not guided by eligibility concerns (or at least there is no proof of such motivation). Rather, certain administrators and faculty had misguided but well-intentioned motives, or were misled by their faculty leadership. That resistance to see what is obvious to most and to staunchly defend anyone connected to the athletic department -- even if only by an organizational dotted line -- colors their thinking. (Admittedly, the same could be said of the converse: that those who strongly want to tie culpability to the coaches and counselors read through a lens of a different color.)
The measure chosen by Wainstein to analyze the impact of paper classes on GPAs was not the NCAA's eligibility guideline. Though Wainstein considered using the NCAA threshold, it was assessed to be "not practically feasible" since the NCAA rules have changed over the course of the time period covered by the report and vary over the course of a student-athlete's college career. So a 2.0 threshold -- a traditional and typical threshold for graduation at UNC and elsewhere -- was chosen since that was simple and suitable for the purposes of the the impact analysis.
The Wainstein Report, itself, acknowledges inherent limitations in the analysis, meaning it's not meant to be interpreted as a hard-and-fast figure, mainly because there's no way to know what alternative grade might have occurred had another course taken place of the paper class.
The specific number is not important. It's a tree among the forest. The message isn't the specific quantity but the recognition of a real impact paper classes gave students (and the subset of students who were also athletes) on GPAs.
When the WRAL reports says, "
169 athletes whose grades in such classes kept them eligible to compete in athletics," that is factually inaccurate. The inaccuracy, though, is not an misinterpretation. Though the Wainstein Report specifically did not apply an athletic eligibility threshold in the analysis, the reason for doing so was not to avoid looking at impact on athletic eligibility. On the contrary, the Report - before and after the impact analysis section- is centrally focused on examining athletic motives for either generation of or exploitation of the paper class system, particularly managing student-athlete eligibility. It's willful ignorance to believe that the Wainstein's impact analysis section was meant to be cloistered from any assessment with regard to athletic eligibility, particularly since that section of the Report is bounded on either side by discussion and examination of the student-athlete eligibility motive.
It IS reasonable to assume that not all of the 169 athletes mentioned would have resulted in actual, NCAA-dictated athletic ineligibility where their paper class grades "vacated." A sub-2.0 GPA wouldn't have always necessarily translated to athletic eligibility. For instance, under current NCAA rules, freshman and sophomore student-athletes may receive a little more leniency than the 2.0 threshold. At UNC, this would translate to 1.8 and 1.9 respectively. Thus, that 169 number would be reduced by some amount equal to first or second year student-athletes who fell within their respective margins between 1.8 or 1.9 and the 2.0 GPA threshold used by Wainstein.
But so what? As I said above, the actual number is not the point; but it IS the point the Bradley Bethels would like to fixate on, as if it's a fatal error. It's not.
(Note: since posting this article, I came across another does claim to find a fatal flaw in the impact analysis on GPA in the Wainstein Report as it applies to NCAA eligibility. I've mirrored it here.)
It is a reasonable, logical and contextual inference to make that if for 169 student-athletes, paper classes boosted GPAs above the 2.0 threshold, then an athletic eligibility benefit of some similar magnitude followed. We don't have the data or granularity to know just what percentage of that 169 would have experienced an athletic eligibility impact, but it's folly to believe the number would be even close to 0.
It's not a case of apples and oranges either. In the case of GPA impact sets, one (athletic ineligibility) is a subset of the other (sub-2.0 GPA). The message from Wainstein's 169 "factoid" is not the specific number. The indictment doesn't change if the actual number of student-athletes that avoided athletic ineligibility was actually 150 or 125.
And here's the other thing a supposed educator like Bethel seems to miss in his compulsion to argue from a position that seeks to insulate the athletic department from culpability. Even if those marginal cases that would not technically have been NCAA-defined ineligible, they would still have been in an academic probationary or warning status at UNC. It would be a grotesque example of academic negligence, especially for an institution of the self-claimed rigor of UNC, to place a student-athlete on academic probation but not restrict his or her participation in the distractions and time-consuming activities of varsity athletics during that probationary period. (Frankly, I'm stunned if this has actually been UNC's standard practice, as Bethel has intimated.) The point of giving a student a semester to raise his GPA above the 2.0 threshold is not to punish, but to offer the chance to regain satisfactory academic standing. Being declared ineligible to play athletics is not punishment. It's setting priorities, particularly at a crucial stage when failure to improve in the classroom within the span of a probationary semester results in dismissal from the school.
So whether the NCAA dictates it or not, I would think UNC, of all schools, would have a stricter adherence to athletic eligibility based on its own, higher standards. Someone who claims to be an educator and an academics-first proponent would see this. A fan or athletic booster worried more about NCAA sanctions would not.
