W hen we first broke the news of nine people who will face disciplinary action from the University for their involvement in the fake paper class scheme, my first thought wasn’t, “Let’s get this story up.”
And those who know me know that’s weird. Instead of thinking about The Daily Tar Heel being first and being right — both things that I love — my first thought was a journalism commandment:
“Afflict the comfortable. Comfort the afflicted.”
The employees facing disciplinary action are just a list of mid-level employees — people who were obviously complicit in the scandal but didn’t truly have the power to be ringleaders.
Somehow, the University seems comfortable with the knowledge that a couple of athletic counselors, a secretary and professors had the ability to perpetuate massive academic fraud — more comfortable than it would feel acknowledging the reality that mixing a top research university with a Division I athletics department is not always a good idea. Perhaps that’s why the University hasn’t done that yet.
Students from the Black Student Movement and The Real Silent Sam Coalition stood on the steps of South Building Wednesday and admonished the University for placing the blame for the scandal squarely on the shoulders of the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies. This, they said, was a continuation of an age-old tradition of denying legitimacy to people of color and their history at predominantly white institutions like UNC.
Students were right to feel outrage. Professors from the Progressive Faculty Network were right to bark back at the University and media outlets. In a way, that protest was able to do something this newspaper and many others haven’t done enough of lately.
It comforted the afflicted.
In reality, this could have happened to any department. Any secretary could have been coerced by the power and influence of college athletics. And while Deborah Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro should have to pay for their misdeeds, they aren’t the reason this scandal happened.
