Ned Barnett’s March 8 column “What endures at UNC-Chapel Hill” invited the reader to wallow in a warm bath of nostalgia and to embrace unfounded optimism about the university as a “moral center.”
Barnett is apparently quite happy with the university’s official response to the academic fraud detailed by the Wainstein report: “the university’s suffering has tested its character” and “administrators have been forced out,” he said. Barnett is too easily satisfied.
The really top people have gone unscathed: Why, for example, have St. Roy (Williams) and St. Sylvia (Hatchell) not been asked to account for the benefits their basketball players may have received from the “paper courses” system? The head coaches’ sufferings seem rather limited compared with the career devastation endured by their colleagues lower down the university food chain.
And sorry, Ned, but watching a heartwarming videotape of the 1993 University Day celebrations just doesn’t make me feel any better.
R.A. Haskell
Chapel Hill
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