Chancellor Carol Folt recently told the UNC Board of Trustees that the University must fully acknowledge lessons from its past regarding academic and athletic scandals — noting that this message has not been communicated well to the UNC community.
If Folt wants to remain true to her word, then an appropriate place to start would be to release information related to these issues. The Daily Tar Heel is not part of a recent lawsuit by The (Raleigh) News & Observer, but the message and goals behind it are valuable to all University stakeholders.
John Drescher, the executive editor of the N&O, says the administration has refused since June to cooperate with the paper.
As a result, the N&O sued Folt in late January in Wake County Superior Court in order to gain access to information.
UNC has stated emphatically that the information the N&O wishes to examine would break privacy laws by allowing students to be identified.
The paper has asked for the information that the University sent to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges in relation to the then-Department of African and Afro-American Studies before 2006.
UNC has released similar data from 2006 to 2011. If UNC deemed the data from this time period as public record, why not release it for the mid-1990s? It is a logical inconsistency.
Also, it seems unlikely that the identity of students could be potentially gleaned from the information. The N&O has only asked for the breakdown of the fake classes by course title, sport and semester. To correctly identify students from this small amount of information is both unfeasible and impractical.
Releasing this information is a necessary step to owning what has happened and helping the public and UNC community move on.
