Opinion: Journalists are still showing areas UNC can improve

It’s been about two years since the Wainstein report irrevocably changed the discourse concerning student athletics and academic integrity on this campus.

Last week Dan Kane, a (Raleigh) News & Observer investigative reporter, published a series of articles shedding new light on the early days of the scandal.

It is no secret why this scandal began in the first place. Expecting young adults to thrive in an environment where they are supposed to perform at a professional athletic level while requiring them to maintain academic excellence at a major university is simply unrealistic.

The NCAA still requires these demands and has done little to enforce a punishment befitting decades of fraud at UNC.

None of this is to say improvements have not been made — Chancellor Folt and UNC have taken steps to ensure a higher degree of accountability. But the fundamental systems that caused the scandal are still intact.

Before the Wainstein Report was published, then-Chancellor Holden Thorp declared that when weighing the importance of athletics and academics, the latter was clearly the priority.

“Academics are going to have to come first. And it’s clear that they haven’t to the extent that they should,” said Thorp in an interview with the N&O.

This assessment seems reasonable given the purpose of an institution that provokes critical thinking.

However, the N&O’s series highlights ways in which the UNC Board of Trustees and other University officials were willing to acknowledge the undue burden placed on many student athletes, but failed to act upon it.

“Is this a) another self-inflicted wound or b) did the N&O misquote or misconstrue Holden’s remarks?” former Board of Trustees member Alston Gardner asked Lowry Caudill, a current trustee who is also a member of the Ram’s Club executive committee, in an email.

Gardner’s reaction to Thorp’s interview seems to suggest that the trustees identified the problem facing UNC to be the media’s representation of the University, rather than the laundry list of negligent activities that went unchecked, such as the creation of paper classes.

And because the trustees misidentified the problem as a manipulation of key facts rather than the facts themselves, they also came up with the wrong solution of ramping up the University’s public relations team, which costs the University considerable financial resources.

The work of journalists like Kane is forcing the University to reckon with its past grievances to this day — to the benefit of all students.