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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?"
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?
