Opinion: Do not rush to scapegoat or exonerate athletes

Blame is a difficult thing to apportion when there seems to be a smoking gun in every hand.

Such is the case with UNC’s athletic and academic scandal. While blame has been lobbed at targets ranging from individual administrators to capitalism and racism, relatively little discussion has centered on how much, if any, blame athletes who knowingly took fraudulent classes deserve. This is understandable given the moral complexity of the situation.

Let’s start with those who collectively deserve most of the condemnation.

Kenneth Wainstein’s report highlights the guilt of Deborah Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro. But they did not act alone.

Blame the NCAA for profiting off big-time sports while maintaining the fiction that each of it’s high-profile, unpaid employees can be both a student and an athlete. Blame UNC’s Department of Athletics for doing its very best to win in this flawed system. Blame the faculty members who failed to ask questions and raise concerns as they sailed past red flags. Blame the coaches whose myopia, if they are to be believed, was just as great. Blame the University, which in its treatment of whistleblowers gave potential dissidents every reason to suspect they would be silenced or excoriated for speaking up. Take the lead of “The Minor” and blame students for cheering players to their faces and mocking their ostensibly poor academic qualifications behind their backs. Don’t forget the fraternity circuit that directed members to paper classes, knowing they required little work.

Who else does that leave?

For one, it leaves UNC athletes, and this is where things get trickier. In our rush to defend the value of our degrees, the rigor of our coursework and our cherished athletic idols, many of us have been far too willing to ignore the moral implications of athletes’ participation in fraudulent classes.

To be sure, paper classes ended before most of us arrived at UNC. Furthermore, many athletes produced academic work in their paper classes. Yet a tremendous number did not. Between 1999 and 2011, a full 21 percent of UNC athletes and 2 percent of the general student body took a paper class. Over 40 percent of those papers contained 25 percent or more unoriginal material.

Athletes were virtually the sole participants in bifurcated paper classes and, through their interactions with tutors and coaches, had substantial knowledge of the full scope of the paper class system. Thus, among students, they were in the best position to spot and report fraud. Failure to acknowledge this truth denies athletes their moral agency.

But this agency was denied in varying degrees by factors beyond their control. Players who spoke up might have faced retribution from teammates or coaches. Athletes spend massive amounts of time practicing and traveling and — in some cases — were admitted despite their limited preparation for college-level work. If a player has been socialized to see class as a cumbersome addendum to athletics, they might detect little wrong with paper classes.

Does this describe the situation that a majority of cheating athletes found themselves in?

If so, collegiate athletics at UNC are immoral. Any system so powerful that it could deny most athletes the ability to make choices about cheating needs to be eliminated or dramatically reformed.

If this does not describe the status quo — if some players quietly exploited the path of least resistance — then they, too, deserve blame for harming UNC.

Unfortunately, the Wainstein report, with its limited scope, failed to ask this question.

Individuals hold many identities. In this case, it seems reasonable to conclude that hundreds of athletes might have been both victims of a system beyond their control and collaborators in the worst aspects of that system.