TO THE EDITOR:
For months, passions and tempers have been running high over Mary Willingham’s controversial claims about athlete literacy levels. The Daily Tar Heel editorial board has now jumped into the fray, referring to “claims made by Mary Willingham that 60 percent of UNC’s athletes read below an eighth grade level.” Willingham, to be clear, has said no such thing. Instead, she referred to a small subset of athletes (176) who took literacy and other tests over an eight-year period. The questions are: did 17 or only 3-4 of these students have extremely low literacy levels, and were 12, 23 (two of the experts rendered slightly different estimates) or 105 reading at the 9th grade level or below? The differences are meaningful, of course, but the numbers are small either way.
More important, the DTH failed to acknowledge the larger argument that Willingham’s claim about literacy levels provided her the pretext to pursue. The NCAA cartel, especially in the revenue sports, forces athletes to subordinate their academic needs and interests to the needs of the athletic machine. Willingham’s point is that all “profit sport” athletes, whether they came to UNC underprepared academically (in whatever number) or fully capable but determined to please their coaches and hone their games, are denied access to the full menu of options available to other students. The admissions calculus ultimately involves eligibility prospects, not the prospect of earning a meaningful degree, and this is why a “paper class” system could flourish here for two decades. Nothing in the challenge to Willingham’s statistics changes the reality of this endemic problem.
Jay M. Smith
Professor of history
