UNC AD softpedals scandal

Published October 30, 2014

Editorial by News and Observer, October 29, 2014.

Perhaps, from a person who’d rather talk about a lacrosse stadium and luxury boxes for the Smith Center basketball facility, this was to be expected. But it’s frustrating nonetheless that in a radio interview Bubba Cunningham, UNC-Chapel Hill’s athletics director, seemed to be trying to soften the crushing and embarrassing blow of a report on a long-running athletics/academics scandal.

Washington attorney Kenneth Wainstein recently issued his exhaustive report on the scandal, reported over the last three years by The News & Observer, showing thousands of enrollments in bogus classes through the African studies program that seemed to benefit a disproportionate number of athletes.

This was a monumental scandal, one it turns out the university tried to “manage” by spending nearly $800,000 with a public relations firm. In the end, with the Wainstein report, that didn’t do much good because this was never a public relations problem at all. It was an ethics problem, a credibility problem, an honesty problem.

Following the report, NCAA head Mark Emmert is saying he views the UNC-CH scandal as a serious one, and he’s going to feel some heat from other schools that have been penalized in the past to bring the hammer down in Chapel Hill.

But curiously, at the very time Emmert is taking the UNC scandal ever more seriously, UNC-CH’s Director of Athletics Bubba Cunningham is trying to soft-pedal the Wainstein report fallout.

In a radio interview shortly after the ink dried on the report, Cunningham appeared to be downplaying the report itself and the possibility that the university might be sanctioned for what the report said about an 18-year period when athletes (and, yes, non-athletes) used bogus courses to increase their grade point averages.

“So as bad as it was,” Cunningham said, “as long as it was, it’s really starting to sink in that there was maybe one, two, three classes for somebody, so that might be six or nine hours out of 120 that it takes to graduate. So it’s shocking, but as you have a little more time to look at it, it’s not quite as bad as I was thinking it was 48 hours ago.”

Chancellor Carol Folt needs to rein in Cunningham and any other officials who might be tempted even to appear to be trying to rationalize the monumental embarrassment of the Wainstein report. She has expressedalarm about it, and she should not tolerate any comment from university officials that could be interpreted as not taking Wainstein’s findings entirely seriously.

The way to overcome what has been a humiliating episode is to face it and fix it. Trying to “spin” it in any way will just make things worse, and that’s the last thing the university needs.

October 30, 2014 at 7:05 am
Emery Ashley says:

And how many articles have you written over the last 3+ years detailing the steps taken to fix the problems? Articles on those things not sensational enough ?