Opinion: UNC shouldn’t try to hide from tough conversations

If the University was hoping that waiting until New Year’s Eve to confirm the names of fired employees would limit the resurgence of conversation around the Wainstein report, they were likely correct — despite the best efforts of this publication and others.

Waiting until moments when few people are paying attention to the news cycle to release embarrassing information is a standard public relations method most commonly seen in the typical news cycle in the form of the “Friday news dump.”

New Year’s Eve is like the holy grail of Fridays in a certain sense — and especially for the University.

Most publications are both short-staffed and consumed with year-end reviews and trivialities on and around New Year’s Eve. This newspaper, the one that follows the trials and tribulations of the University most closely, is not in publication at all. Students are not on campus, and few others are chomping at the bit to engage with the multitude of problems they left behind on campus.

Perhaps taken on its own, the timing of the University’s release could be viewed without suspicion, but given the University’s Wainstein strategy thus far of obfuscation, avoidance and expanded attention to public relations, a healthy amount of skepticism seems reasonable.

While the University’s apparent efforts to avoid more short-term conversation about the Wainstein report and its implications were probably successful, the long-term wisdom of this strategy of avoidance is questionable.

The big-picture problems that prompted the fraud documented by the Wainstein report are still with us.

Despite this lack of resolution, the University’s public relations strategy has failed to acknowledge any narratives that use a wider lens to discuss the place of big-time athletics at an academic institution.

This strategy delays the needed conversations around the various injustices inherent in the collegiate athletics system — problems that, without being fully reckoned with, are likely to plague the University for years to come as national consciousness around the issues of individual exploitation of athletes and the corruption of universities’ academic missions expands.

It would be a mistake to criticize the distraction politics displayed by the University administration without acknowledging the various and intense pressures its leaders face.

The university is under scrutiny from a local political climate hostile to its academic freedom and decreased public support for education. And it is, as always, in need of financial support from alumni who must be kept happy.

Pursuing a critical conversation around athletics, a part of the university that holds a special place in the hearts of legions of community members, carries risks.

But the University’s aspirations to be a progressive, morally upright institution demand that such a conversation take place. Trying to run from it will not serve the University’s interests in the long term.

Yes, as the University’s public relations strategy suggests, the University’s too often unsung and greatest impacts are in its leadership in a variety of academic disciplines, and big-time athletics help to make that status possible.

But if the problems are allowed to fester, they threaten to do more harm to the University’s mission in the long term than an honest conversation would.

If the University truly wants to be the “University of the people” suggested by the advertisements that currently run during nationally televised basketball games, then it should not treat information about its dealings in anything less than honest terms.

It should engage its community in dialogues about what this institution must do next to address some of its most worrying flaws.