Down she swoops, from the emerital ether, to speak the truth to the new management team at this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Scandal-management-wise Chapel Hill has done the thing, the thing that every jock school does when the shit truly hits the fan – it has dumped its previous management and put in a team of deer-in-the-headlight innocents who can say
Well we weren’t here for the long Nyang’oro Nightmare so we don’t really know what’s going on but we’re pure-hearted people doing our best in a bad situation, etc etc etc.
UD applauds the move, it’s a fine move, it’s an obvious move.
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But, as Orwell wrote:
‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’
You can bring in the deer to try to control the present, but it’s the pesky past …
Madeline Levine swooped in from the past, and (so far at least) the deer have not been able to herd her.
“During the year that I served as interim dean I was made aware of the serious academic deficiencies that some of our newly recruited athletes would have to overcome if they were ever to succeed at UNC,” Levine wrote. “From what I was told … I thought it highly probable that one of these students was functionally illiterate.”
She wrote that she went to the university provost, who was then Bernadette Gray-Little, now chancellor at the University of Kansas.
She said she was “told what I already knew – that the decision had been made to grant special admission to this student and there was nothing to be done about it by then. That was true, but I still feel guilty that I let the matter drop and did not publicly express my dismay.”
One likes Levine’s continued guilt – it sounds right, it sounds real. One believes Levine.
Levine … accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times’ front page on New Year’s Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes’ tutoring program. Willingham said her research found that more than half of 183 athletes specially tested for learning deficiencies over an eight-year period could not read at a high-school level.
“Mary Willingham was courageous in speaking out about her experience as a reading specialist and academic counselor for such students,” Levine wrote. “It is appalling that the highest officials at UNC – before it became clear that attacking a whistle-blower is not a smart PR move – mounted a concerted public attack on the accuracy of Ms. Willingham’s statistical analysis and, by implication, against her personally, while steadfastly refusing to engage with the core issue that concerns her: the exploitation of student-athletes and the concomitant abuse of the academic values by which a great university should live.”
October 23rd, 2015 at 8:25AM
[…] University chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little, chief academic officer at Chapel Hill during years of the now-notorious Nyang-oro scandal, worries in particular about the future of […]