TO THE EDITOR:
Former UNC football player Michael McAdoo lost his reinstatement-seeking hearing last week after the NCAA ruled him ineligible for receiving improper academic assistance.
That was the lead in most N.C. papers, but the disturbing part came in the middle paragraphs and moved up to the lead a few days later. The News & Observer nailed it with a Sunday headline: UNC honor court failed to find McAdoo’s obvious plagiarism.
I thought the same thing when I read that McAdoo’s paper, which the Honor Court found problematic last fall only because of a tutor’s help with citations, was actually splattered with undetected plagiarism. And who discovered this? No, it was not the University nor its Honor Court, both of which had access to the paper for almost a year. McAdoo’s lawyer published the offending paper in his lawsuit, and a few N.C. State fans spent the two minutes it took to understand the real scam of the paper. State fans figured it out.
You draw your own conclusion about Michael McAdoo given these facts. I won’t say a word. But I can’t stay quiet about the Honor Court.
I never had any direct experience with the Honor Court while I was a UNC undergraduate, but I was naturally curious about a system that prided itself on peer judgment. I knew a couple good people, both Morehead scholars, who sat for the court. One of them explained that cases were confidential, but I knew most of them ended with guilty verdicts. It sounded legitimate. I still wondered how high-achieving undergraduates could find the time and training to prosecute, defend and judge these numerous cases. Were they really capable and dedicated to such a significant task?
The McAdoo case might pull the curtain open to answer this and other questions. The University stated that the Honor Court does not use anti-plagiarism software, a duty reserved for professors and teaching assistants. These faculty members refer cases and evidence to the Honor Court and wash their hands. The process leaves a rickety bridge between investigation and prosecution. In fact, the Honor Court “rarely” investigates at all. It simply presents the faculty’s evidence.
The aforementioned circumstance is not specific to McAdoo’s case nor the cases of other student athletes. It is true for all cases. The Observer did report one problem specific to student athletes. A faculty member wrote on a survey that the athletic department had intervened to keep a student-athlete’s case out of the Honor Court. I have no words.
Nobody can fault any one person, but everyone can fault the system. I am beginning to think we will never know most of what we want to know about the UNC football scandal.
