The gunny, sexually perverted basketball team is of course only the most obvious sign of thorough institutional squalor.
Current and former employees the AP interviewed described scenarios in which top-level administrators refused to hold themselves or others accountable, both inside and outside the athletic department. One said the “guardrails” designed to protect students and faculty — from everything from retaliation for whistleblowing to sexual improprieties — had all but disappeared.
“Because there’s so much churn in our upper administration, we never get to the point of hammering out who is actually accountable for upholding policies,” [one insider] said.
In one instance, a lawsuit last year filed by a Jane Doe alleges a longtime professor with ties to the athletic department “harassed and groomed female students for years, coercing them into sexual relations and bragging about the same” while school officials looked the other way. The plaintiff alleges she was sexually assaulted by the professor.
Another case alleges that two professors who blew the whistle about hiring practices they claimed flouted human-resource policies had their complaints intercepted by an administrator involved in the hiring, who then pushed for disciplinary cases to be opened against those professors. One has been demoted from his deanship.
[The] Office of Institutional Equity, which handles Title IX and other discrimination complaints and should have been on the front lines of the hazing allegations, [was] marginalized, with administrators ignoring some recommendations produced by the office and putting others off.
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Uh lets see what else.
- misappropriation of funds
- unethical hiring
- humongous lawsuits filed by the latest set of massively overpaid now-fired shitskis
- the decision to end a policy that “student-athletes would be dismissed if found guilty of (or pleaded no contest to) a felony. That allowed one player to remain on the team at the time the rules were changed. It also furthered New Mexico State’s reputation as a place where athletes and coaches get second chances — perhaps without accountability.” Nice way to put it. Perhaps without.
Look. Tons of universities in this country have forged winning basketball/football teams by scouring the junior colleges for naughty numbskulls who play really well. It’s a beyond-belief sordid thing for a university to do, but tons of them do it. Many come to grief as the bad boys launch crime sprees, start fights on the field/court, get involved in academic cheating scandals, rape people, blah blah. Small price to pay, says a school like Nebraska, which has an AMAZING record of recruiting crazyass assholes. It’s one way to field winning teams and who cares if players beat the shit out of students ahead of them in line for pizza just cuz they’re getting impatient.
UD will admit that, in a strong field, NMSU has distinguished itself. But the indecent tale of school-destruction is one it shares with many cohorts.