Last Thursday, I received a response from UNC to a public records request I'd placed over a year ago. It had been so long, I couldn't even remember why I had asked for this in the first place:
"I request a copy of all emails sent from Mary Willingham's @unc.edu email account to any other @unc.edu account with the transmission date of September 4th, 2013."~request ID #150156
I put in the request a couple of weeks after the release of the Wainstein Report so I thought maybe my request had been sparked by something Bradley Bethel had written.
As I scrolled through the 30+ pages of emails, it sure seemed like 9/4/2013 must have been a significant day, full of discussions pertinent to the scandal. Maybe it was just a typical day in the life of Mary Willingham at the time while she was on staff at UNC-Chapel Hill.
That was the day NPR's Morning Edition ran a short piece by Frank Deford on "Why Keep Athletes Eligible But Uneducated?" in which he refers to, and related comments from, Mary Willingham. Her email that day had several encouraging and congratulatory messages referencing that piece.
Also included was the heated email exchange between Bradley Bethel and Dr. Jay Smith (see "Silent Dishonesty: Distinguished Professor Withholds the Truth About Research on Athletes" for Bethel's account of it.)
But it was an email from former tutor/counselor Amy Kleissler that caught my attention, and that's when I remembered why I'd submitted the public records request.
One of Bethel's post-Wainstein Report blogs began with an excerpt from a September 4th, 2013 email note from Willingham to an unidentified former academic support staff member:
"I never doubted you or that you helped students enormously and selflessly loved them and Carolina. The story of how our UNC athletic system worked/had to work and the dedicated people behind the scenes is nothing short of amazing. You played a role in it and you should be proud - our students (and staff) loved you [. . .]. The collegiate sport system (profit sport model) is messed up, not the people (well, maybe some of those guys in Indianapolis)."
This was from Bethel's November 4th, 2014 blog entry titled The Wainstein Report and the (Anti-) Athletics Reform Group. I believe this and the other lead-off quote were intended to highlight an apparent incongruity between Willingham's public criticisms of UNC's academic support services for student-athletes and what she had expressed privately; or maybe to show an evolution in Willingham's tune having occurred sometime during 2013.
The public records release revealed that it was Amy Kleissler who was the former academic support staff member for whom Willingham was expressing such admiration; but it also provided the email from Kleissler that had evoked that outpouring from Willingham that Bethel hadn't included or perhaps hadn't seen.
Earlier that same morning, Kleissler had sent Willingham the following message:
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
Mary Willingham and Dr. Jay Smith, in other emails that same day, refer to some event or issue that Kleissler obliquely touches on in her email about the University's treatment of Amy. I can't decipher what that might have been, but at least in September 2013, both Willingham and Smith seem to empathize with something about Kleissler's treatment by the University and maybe some reason for her departure.
In the ensuing months and years after that email from Amy, Mary would become notorious, particularly after her CNN appearance in Sara Ganim's report in January 2014. In October 2014, the Wainstein investigation came to a close; and the Willingham/Smith book Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports would be released March 2015.
I tend to think Willingham's tone and at times hyperbolic public criticisms during that period -- that often left behind feelings of perceived disparagement of student-athletes and former ASPSA staffers -- may have burned some of the collegial bonds she may have had with those former students and counselors.
This is just speculation on my part, but at some point between that September 2013 email from Kleissler and Bethel's November 2014 blog, I believe the relationship and mutual admiration between Willingham and Kleissler may have soured, at least on Kleissler's part.
Even before knowing who Willingham was writing to in that email excerpted for Coaching the Mind, I'd wondered how Bethel had gotten a hold of Willingham's email in the first place. My guess was someone had shared it with him; most likely the author.
Bethel has often cited defense of "his colleagues" as a main motivator for his criticisms of Willingham, and it's possible Kleissler is one of those colleagues. Kleissler and Bethel remain work colleagues to this day, even after their days employed by UNC.
Whatever it was that happened (if anything), I'd be most curious to know more about what Amy was referencing in her 2013 email to Willingham and what her perspective is, today, in the post-Wainstein world. I'm hoping -- and anticipating -- that her voice will be included in "Unverified: the Film."
