A former interim dean of UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences has sent a letter to Chancellor Carol Folt and Provost Jim Dean, challenging their claims that the university was not admitting athletes unable to read at a high-school level.
Madeline Levine, a highly honored professor emeritus, said that as a dean, she was made aware of instances in which the university has admitted athletes with substantial academic challenges, including one she suspected was “functionally illiterate” during her tenure.
Levine also 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.”