Nationally, the football scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill isn’t receiving all that much attention beyond sports pages, but it should be. The scandal is not just about violating NCAA technical rules (which I view as unfair anyway, because they treat students like university property) but about the academic enterprise. The scandal puts a mirror up to the nature of universities today.
As nearly everyone in North Carolina knows, Holden Thorp, the chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill, dismissed the school’s football coach, Butch Davis, last week. His decision came after nearly a year of repeatedly defending Davis in the face of a massive investigation by the NCAA, which is still underway.
To recap the basics, UNC-Chapel Hill is accused of violating NCAA rules regarding contacts between agents and players and regarding inappropriate payments of players’ expenses, as well as academic violations involving too much help by a tutor (who also tutored Coach Davis’s son). While an assistant coach—accused of making improper contacts with an agent—resigned last September, the chancellor continued to express faith in Butch Davis and the athletic director, Dick Baddour. Although Davis was dismissed on July 27, he was not fired for cause, and the university will buy out his contract for $2.7 million. Baddour announced his own early retirement on Thursday.
So what happened to change Holden Thorp’s mind? As critics of the decision are pointing out in comments around the state, no new information about Butch Davis led to Thorp’s decision. Instead, one really big problem surfaced—plagiarism. In my view, that was pivotal.
Ironically, the plagiarism was revealed by the student himself. As outlined in a series of articles in the Raleigh News and Observer and a Sports Illustrated blog, Michael McAdoo had been declared ineligible for play last fall on the grounds that he had received excessive help from the tutor under investigation. But in July McAdoo sued both the NCAA and the university in state court, alleging that the help he received was not so extreme as to require ineligibility.
Court records showed that the university had initially agreed with McAdoo, arguing before the NCAA that the tutor had merely provided help with footnotes for a term paper. According to the Daily Tar Heel, the UNC-Chapel Hill student newspaper, Dick Baddour told the NCAA that “this was Michael McAdoo’s work, even the citations were his work. They were not formatted correctly, however.” But Baddour was unsuccessful in persuading the NCAA to reinstate McAdoo.
When McAdoo sued in July, that paper became part of the court record and therefore public. Boosters at rival NC State started looking at the paper, “The Evolution of Swahili Culture on the East Coast of Africa,” and quickly discovered that large portions had simply been copied from several sources.
To take just one example, it’s hard to see that any faculty member—or UNC lawyer—reading “Mohammedanism” to describe Islam would have failed to question its usage by a 21st-century college student. (It came from a 1911 book about Africa that also identified the population of Africa as 160 million, as did McAdoo’s paper; Africa’s population is around 1 billion today.)
In other words, in its pursuit of eligible football players, the university had descended to the most abhorrent kind of academic shoddiness—neglect of obvious plagiarism. The original UNC investigation claimed that the tutor had helped with footnotes, but the investigators had ignored the fact that much of the writing had been copied almost verbatim.
These facts evoke a cascade of questions about UNC-Chapel Hill. If this plagiarism showed up almost randomly, how many other examples are being hidden? Was the university’s failure to recognize plagiarism a matter of protecting an athlete or is plagiarism routine throughout the university?
Undoubtedly asking such questions himself, Thorp decided to get rid of Davis. As he said in a statement on July 27, “I can no longer overlook the fact that what started as a purely athletic issue has begun to chip away at this university’s integrity.” He justified his slow response this way: “I have been deliberate in my approach to understanding this situation fully, and I have worked to be fair to everyone involved.”
From the very beginning, Chancellor Thorp—at 46, an unusually young chancellor who has been in office only since 2008—seemed to take the academic violations more seriously than the agent-benefit violations (as he should). Thorp is a scholar, a chemist with many patents to his name who has co-written a book about the “entrepreneurial university.” Like many other university heads, he seems to have been rolled by the more powerful segments of the university—the athletic administrators and their boosters—but he finally said, “Enough.”
Now, Thorp is getting hit from all sides. Some say he waited too long; others are outraged that he dropped a coach who gave the university a winning season last year in spite of losing some key players.
My take is a little different.
Thorp did about as well as any university administrator could do in a political hot seat, which is where a chancellor always is with respect to athletic issues. In his own language, he was “deliberate”—too deliberate for many people—and he defended Davis multiple times. But when plagiarism was revealed to the world, the violation of academic standards was just too much. (A contributing factor was probably Butch Davis’s somewhat cavalier attitude when speaking to reporters in Pinehurst, North Carolina, on July 25. While Davis formally accepted responsibility, he made statements like “any more details about that obviously are things you’d have to ask somebody who knows a lot more about it than I do.”) The man had to go.
As the Pope Center has written a number of times, the reputation of the institution is what motivates university presidents and chancellors. The issue is not, say, whether UNC’s reputation as a top-five public university according to US News is justified. Rather, the issue is whether the university is starting to look like the schools captured in the title “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” To defend the university’s reputation, Thorp had to act.
At the risk of sounding excessively generous to Thorp, I would like to make a comparison to a story about a real political hot seat, one with life-and-death consequences. That is the 1966 movie A Man for All Seasons, a somewhat romanticized version of the 16th-century conflict between Henry the Eighth and his councilor, Sir Thomas More.
Henry wanted to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon (in order to marry Anne Boleyn, who was eventually beheaded on Henry’s orders). The divorce violated Catholic doctrine, which More was committed to uphold. I was young when I saw the movie, but as I remember it, More kept trying to placate Henry—temporizing and compromising. (I’ve read since that More resigned his post as lord chancellor in order to avoid Henry’s wrath, but that still wasn’t enough).
As I watched the movie back then, I couldn’t understand why More didn’t put his foot down as soon as he saw what Henry was doing. If he was going to take a moral stand, why didn’t he just do it? Ultimately, of course, More did put his foot down, and he was executed.
The relevance of that drama to today’s football scandal is this: It reminds us that in the real world, few people start out as heroes. Thomas More didn’t, although he became one (a saint in the Catholic Church). The absence of heroes is especially true of politics, and there is nothing more political than a university (fortunately, the stakes are not as high as in 16th century England). In tense situations where many people have varying levels of power, decision-makers hope for the best and try to avoid the worst. That often leads to caviling, compromise, even concealment, and sometimes those tactics work.
So too at UNC-Chapel Hill. I do not have any inside details, but the pressures on Thorp from UNC boosters and donors were very strong. Davis had a winning 2010 season, even though 14 players missed at least one game because of the allegations; one top player (an NFL prospect) was dismissed from the team; and two other top players were declared permanently ineligible. UNC’s team had been in three bowl games during Davis’s watch (which began in 2006).
I have no doubt that Thorp was assured again and again by Davis and Baddour that it would all blow over. Certainly, Thorp knew that successful football seasons can wash away many problems and also keep revenues flowing to the university.
Given all that pressure, plus perhaps some misbegotten faith in the wrong people and only brief experience as a chancellor, it took a long time for Thorp to come to the right conclusion.
But he did, and he should be commended for it.