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The Daily Tar Heel

Letter: Willingham praise has overlooked her flaws

TO THE EDITOR:

I am somewhat perplexed by the call from many fellow UNC faculty members to allow Mary Willingham to return to UNC. She deserves credit for her work in describing some of the details in the class scandal. But other UNC faculty members seem to have forgotten her egregious errors with regards to her research and her reports to the national press. A careful review of her UNC Institutional Review Board applications and her public comments reveals significant errors in her research methods and her human research subject protections. Either Ms. Willingham willfully misled the UNC Internal Review Board or she was incapable of creating a research project with appropriate human subject protections.

Ms. Willingham did not de-indentify data in any meaningful way and gave public comments that may have identified research subjects and purported to reveal research and personal data that should have remained confidential.

For these reasons UNC should acknowledge the contributions that Ms. Willingham provided in exposing the sad story of the irregular classes while also recognizing that her publicly reported research fell far short of Federal and University standards. The recent attempt to lionize Ms. Willingham while making her a focal point of the important ongoing debate about the balance of athletics and academics on campus is, in my opinion, misguided.

Jeffrey T. Spang

School of Medicine

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