Of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the last two days about Mike Rice, Rutgers, and the imperiled president of Rutgers, this, UD reckons, is the best so far, since it stresses not so much the fate of one or two miscreants, but the fate of Rutgers University.
Repeatedly, expert observers are quoted comparing Rutgers to Penn State (“This is a minor league version of Penn State.” “Rice should’ve been gone right away, and especially in the context of [Joe] Paterno and Penn State, neglecting to act is stunning.”), and they are right to do so, because it will probably take around a decade for most Americans to stop thinking Paterno/Sandusky when they think of Penn State. Rutgers is in the same place now.
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It’s quite possible that instead of thinking those two names, they’ll think instead of the names associated with new scandals at Penn State that have overtaken the Paterno/Sandusky scandal. Look at Miami U and Auburn (“Lies, I tell you! It’s all been lies!”) and the University of Tennessee and Ohio State and all. There’s a reason UD has always called big-time university sports the gift that keeps on giving. You’re given a toy with many moving parts when you’re given a big multi million dollar sports enterprise on a small university campus. Your marching band can haze a band member to death. Criminals on your team can rape people. Fans can riot, or constantly trash your campus beyond recognition. Your sadistic coach can appear on film being sadistic. You can’t, like Penn State, replace an academic culture with a corrupt sports culture for decades and then turn around when that absurdity implodes – as it always will – and say no, no, no, we’re a university, we’re doing all these great things. You are doing great things. But it doesn’t matter.
Like Graham Spanier and the rest of the pathetic crew, Rutgers’ Robert Barchi will probably be forced out of a job soon. He has already been outed as an enabler of depravity — which is virtually the job description of a Division I university president.
April 5th, 2013 at 9:06AM
It’s not entirely possible to separate public relations from alumni relations or student engagement, but alumni and students have a relationship to the university as an academic institution, which the general public rarely does. Over the past half-century or more, college football has been dominated by universities particularly concerned with PR: taxpayer-supported publics, and independent schools with large non-alumni constituencies (Notre Dame, BYU) or in fast-growing areas where allegiances are up from grabs (USC, Miami). This, I think, has promoted an attitude of disregard for the reputational risk to the institutional as a whole that may arise from the athletic program. I wonder if this will change now that “reputation management” is becoming a thing.
July 23rd, 2013 at 11:18AM
[…] they want.) Power seems to have gone to the coach’s head to the point where she did a sort of Mike Rice on her players, who report – among other cult rituals – bizarre physical and religious […]