Dear Carolina Community:
Our first year in new roles at Carolina has been a remarkable experience and given us a unique vantage point for viewing the entire University. We meet with students, faculty, and staff daily and witness their transformative work. Carolina people are truly improving our state and changing the world. The extraordinary commitment and success we see across this University — whether viewed as educational innovation, cutting-edge research, technology, and entrepreneurship or seen in our laboratories, classrooms, studios, on our playing fields, and in service across the state — inspires our work every day.
Today, we are writing about the role and integrity of athletics and academics at Carolina. Getting this right is a priority of our new administration, and we know it is important to everyone who loves this University. When we started the new academic year we listened to hundreds of faculty, staff, students, and community members and learned a great deal from the many people who have been working on and caring about these complex issues for a long time.
We recognized early on that we too would need to work closely on this issue. We decided to take on difficult questions that have lingered, but also to press forward with help and input from across the campus on reforms and become active in the increasing and provocative national discourse about collegiate athletics. You have asked us for information related to our past reviews, current reforms, ongoing work, and future plans. We want you, indeed need you, to feel informed and engaged. Today, we launched a new website, https://carolinacommitment.unc.edu/, to house all of this information as part of our commitment to transparency and continued reform. The site will not be static. We plan to post updates and new actions. As new facts become available, whether viewed as positive or negative, we will post them. We also are actively developing plans to drive our own and national reform; we will post these as they become available.
We are currently in the midst of an independent inquiry led by former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kenneth L. Wainstein. To help ensure the integrity of that process, we are limited by how often we are able to comment on specific news reports or social media conversations. We ask for your patience and understanding until the inquiry has been completed.
We want to close by thanking our students, faculty, staff, and alumni for their commitment to making this great institution even stronger. Your dedication is impressive, and you make us proud of Carolina every day.
Sincerely,
Carol L. Folt, Chancellor
James W. Dean, Jr., Executive Vice Chancellor & Provost