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The Daily Tar Heel

Start off on the right foot

As has been done with other campus issues in recent years, the University is commissioning an outside perspective to look at Mary Willingham’s athlete literacy findings.

On Wednesday, a University spokeswoman confirmed that an outside “data analysis is in process,” and administrators expect to have results in the next few weeks.

But when asked who is conducting this analysis, and for any other details about it, no other information could be provided.

If UNC is serious about clearing up any mess associated with these findings, it will go to great lengths to make sure this is a fair, completely independent review conducted by someone without any ties to UNC; i.e. not a University employee.

This analysis should be conducted by a third party with no connection to UNC-CH or the UNC system, with no prior opinions on whether Willingham’s findings are correct or incorrect. Provost Jim Dean was right in justifying the outside review at Friday’s Faculty Council when he said, “Whatever I say about the construct validity of the test will be discounted,” but the person who completes this analysis will have much to do with the accountability of the results.

At the Faculty Council meeting, Dean mentioned to reporters that he had three names in mind from the higher education community that could complete this review. Considering this, transparency should be at an all-time high during this process.

Today there is a Board of Trustees meeting, and there could not be a more perfect moment to announce who is doing this review, what their process will look like and when the community can expect results. By the time some of you read this editorial, this might already be done — at least we hope. The calls for transparency by the public are very clear, and to say only “a data analysis is in process” will only make the community’s frustration fester, not dissipate.

This independent review should also attempt to decipher what statistically and accurately measures literacy and explore the many options that are purported to measure it. This person should be open-minded enough to consider Willingham’s methods and the reading vocabulary subset of the Scholastic Abilities Test for Adults that she used, and then perform an analysis that determines what the scores she found do in fact show.

Since this time last week in the Willingham-UNC saga, Chancellor Carol Folt has released a statement — make it two after her call for civility on Wednesday — and the University has released its own research to counter the findings. Student government has released a statement dispelling the findings, and a complicated approval for Willingham’s research has been halted — or rather, it was clarified that it never existed in the first place.

While it was the right call to get the University’s perspective out there, the response so far feels like an empty graham cracker crust without the pie to fill it.

This especially applies to student government’s response, whose leaders seem to be mimicking the administration rather than advocating for students.

It is unclear how student leaders can properly call the data invalid if they have not reviewed the spreadsheets themselves.

UNC is only skimming the surface of the implications from these research findings by prematurely releasing repetitive denials, but a thorough independent review will help to tackle the issue at its core.

At the Board of Trustees committee meetings on Wednesday, the University’s new public relations leader said that UNC needs a “stronger brand narrative.”

UNC has one of the strongest brands in the world as the oldest public university in the country. But it’s hard to see that with ongoing scandals that tarnish it.

Making sure this review is fair and actually gets to the bottom of the issue is just one small step toward cleaning it up.

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