TO THE EDITOR:
There now seems to be general agreement that UNC’s faculty has not lived up to its responsibility to ensure that all students receive a genuine college education. When it comes to undergraduate athletes like those now in the news, monitoring their education should have been the particular concern of the Faculty Athletics Committee. In fall 2013 that committee announced that it would begin to “participate in the review and monitoring of student-athlete enrollment patterns,” but why did it take so long? How did that committee manage to overlook outright academic fraud spanning some eighteen years?
According to its own description posted on a university website earlier this year, “the committee has created and is following an established plan to ensure consistent, sustainable outcomes and practices as part of a fact-based approach to evaluating the alignment of the University’s academic mission with athletics.” Having the last part of that otherwise unintelligible sentence speak of the “alignment” of the University’s academic mission with athletics rather than the other way around was probably inadvertent. But in point of fact the FAC has indeed let the tail wag the dog. The economist George Stigler won a Nobel Prize for the concept of “regulatory capture,” and that seems to be what has happened here.
Consider the composition of the current committee. The chancellor and the athletic director are ex officio members. The senior associate athletic director and the director of the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes are on the committee as “advisers.” ASPSA representation might sound like a good idea, but the Wainstein report suggests that many employees of that program have been more interested in athletes’ eligibility than their academic progress.
Of the 10 faculty members of the FAC, six are from professional schools that have little involvement, if any, in the education of student athletes; one of them is the committee’s chair, who teaches radiologic sciences in the Department of Medical Allied Health Professions. Only four members of the committee are from the College of Arts and Sciences, where nearly all athletes are enrolled, and although a couple of them seem to have done good work, another was apparently available to help a football player who needed a paper course to raise his GPA.
