Has UNC forgotten Dan Kane's 2012 article?
Peppers' transcript MIGHT point to broader academic issues at UNC.
Was that not really a story?
A second week has passed and still not a peep from either the N&O or UNC regarding the Eric Hoots story (or non-story, if you insist). I don't think the N&O will be retracting the story or issuing an apology to Mr. Hoots anytime soon. Neither does it look like we'll be getting answers to these questions from UNC.
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| The Hoots Emails: Partially Un-Redacted & Annotated (Click to enlarge) |
We CAN deduce the answer to question #4. Just from their positioning in the PDF file, we can surmise the two emails the N&O investigative team found were both from July 2007. The second, sent by Hoots, was the forwarding of the first that had been received by Hoots. That would make the redacted date on the first most likely Thursday, July 26th, 2007 12:33PM.
That date would put it near the end of the 2007 Summer Session II at UNC. The fact that the papers were being forwarded to Deborah Crowder and not to an instructor, it is reasonable to suspect that the papers were, in fact, for one or two of these classes (tables excerpted from the Wainstein Report Exhibits):
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| (Click to enlarge) |
UNC could, of course, simply affirm that they were NOT on this list without any risk, whatsoever, of violating FERPA; but so far the administration has chosen to neither confirm nor deny anything, thus inviting suspicion.
Mary Willingham -- the FERPA-skirting "whistleblower," in a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to the whole Hoots story/non-story -- recently wrote, "what about the three basketball players (two already off playing in the NBA) who according to their transcripts were ‘taking’ paper classes during the summer of 2007?"
Whether we choose to believe Willingham or not, the possibility that the redacted sender of that email to Hoots was a former athlete pursuing completion of a degree warrants consideration. We don't need Mary Willingham's input to know that…
- Hoots was, and still is, a liaison with former men's basketball players.
- Four former players in 2007 had played while Hoots was a student-manager and a graduate staffer and had gone pro before completing their degrees.
- Three (at least) of those four had been AFAM majors
- At least one of those three was still actively pursuing his AFAM degree in 2007 while in the NBA (finishing in 2009)
- Former players remained in regular contact with Hoots
- Hoots' wife publicly chastised Willingham in 2014, posing the question of how many "paper classes" had been taken by former players returning for degree.
On the other hand, if we consider the possibility that it might have been a former player still engaged in completing his degree, it at least makes some sense how a coaching staff member might have been doing a favor by relaying a message for him. I can see how such a former player, if completing summer session academic work remotely, might not have had ready access to Crowder's email address and might simply have turned to someone he knew well and whose email address he did have handy, and whose job/pleasure it was to help out former team members.
If that IS the explanation, then it's not a non-story at all. It may have been an innocuous and routine communication from Eric's or the student's perspective, but the questions for the institution become anything but innocuous.
"Speculation" means to guess at something without good evidence. We might be speculating if we attempt to identify a specific individual as the sender of that email. But I'd argue it puts us past mere speculation if, based on the circumstantial evidence we do have, we hypothesize that the sender of that email was a former men's basketball player taking a "paper class." If so, a member of the men's basketball coaching staff serving as an intermediary legitimately warrants public interest, regardless of how nice of a guy he is.
The issue under suspicion isn't Hoots's integrity. It's the integrity of the culture of academic support for student-athletes and the system within which he was conditioned that's under suspicion. These "low-level employees" should not be used as human shields to block or discourage valid inquiry of the institution.
