Editorial: UNC Chapel Hill must find its way back
Posted: Thursday, October 23, 2014 8:30 pm
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a school revered for courageously confronting the biggest issues of our times, spent too much time cowering from the rat in its own yard: the pursuit of high-profile athletics at the expense of academics.
The report released Wednesday about the academic scandal involving bogus classes and inflated grades at Carolina was a gut hit for alumni around the nation and world, at least for those not already jaded by this scandal. They should all demand that the school finally take hard steps to fix this problem.
The state’s flagship university has made some efforts along those lines. But it has spent too much time in denial. In that regard, the school lost its way.
That jumps out from the pages of the independent report by Kenneth Wainstein, a former high-ranking U.S. Justice Department official.
The time for denial had passed long before the report covering 18 years came out. That report came after years of stories on the problem by Dan Kane and others at The News & Observer of Raleigh.
Now the school must finally bear down on reform. It should start, as sports columnist Ed Hardin of the News & Record wrote, by putting academics first: “What UNC needs is to put the gate back up, stop allowing unqualified students in for the sake of winning and restore the school’s academic image by making sure students who can’t do the work never get into Carolina in the first place. It doesn’t matter if they’re quarterbacks or point guards or violinists.”
Indeed. This problem goes far beyond athletics. Stories about the report keep referring to about 3,100 students who took the bogus courses, almost half of them athletes. The stories should refer to 3,100 students, more than half of them non-athletes. It’s just as wrong to cheat so you can graduate and then go to law school or med school or Wall Street as it is to cheat so you can play ball, as Journal sports editor Phil Hrichak told our editorial board.
But make no mistake: the pursuit of football and basketball victories and the dollars they bring in were the catalysts for this scourge. Some of those most closely involved are no longer at the university. And the handful of employees the university has fired or placed under disciplinary review in the wake of the report were part of a larger, win-at-all-costs culture that, at the least, tacitly encouraged their wrongdoing.
The school now must bear down on this problem as more NCAA penalties loom. As ominous as that might be to the money-counters, it should not matter. The school must finally realize that academics are its first and most important mission, along with its integrity, to which serous academics should be inherently tied.
Some UNC backers would gripe at losing ground in sports. They would note that their school is not alone, that it’s only a matter of time before another big-name school is busted for similar problems. They’d be right. But it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a school that still means a great deal to a lot of people, must find its way back to a place of honor. We want to once again see the school at its best, not at its worst.
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