As Another Head Rolls at U. of Maryland, an Athletics Scandal Turns Morality Play

AP Photo, Patrick Semansky

Updated (10/31/2018, 7:50 p.m.) with the news that Coach DJ Durkin would also leave.

Wallace D. Loh’s announcement on Tuesday that he plans to resign as president of the University of Maryland at College Park was met with outrage and consternation from alumni, lawmakers, students, and some athletes, who lamented that Loh was the only major figure to lose his job in the wake of a far-reaching athletics scandal. Amid building anger and public pressure, that story shifted sharply on Wednesday evening, when the university announced that DJ Durkin, the head football coach, had been fired.

The news on Tuesday that Loh would be the lone person held accountable at Maryland had fed public skepticism that the football program, rocked since June by the death of a player and reports of an abusive environment, had survived relatively unscathed while a contrite administrator took the fall.

As political pressure on the board reached a fever pitch on Wednesday, with even Maryland’s governor offering condemnation, Loh wrote in a message to the campus that Durkin, too, would leave. “A departure is in the best interest of the university,” he wrote, “and this afternoon Coach Durkin was informed that the university will part ways.” Loh cited “serious concerns” about Durkin from “the overwhelming majority of stakeholders.”

The unfolding crisis at Maryland combines elements of a college-governance case study and a morality play, raising tough questions about possible overreach by the system’s Board of Regents, and deeper concerns about whether the board failed to exert principled leadership for an emotionally raw campus still grieving the death of Jordan McNair, a 19-year-old offensive lineman who suffered a heat stroke after an exhausting workout and died two weeks later.

Numerous news-media outlets, citing insider sources, have reported that the regents gave Loh an ultimatum, telling the president to retain Durkin or risk his own immediate dismissal.

Loh, who is in his eighth year as Maryland’s president, says he plans to step down in June 2019. Campus officials on Wednesday night could not say whether that is still the case.

Durkin had been on administrative leave since August. When he met with players on Tuesday, some of them reportedly walked out. A few took to Twitter, where they framed the coach’s return as representative of a deeper moral failing at the university.

Every Saturday my teammates and I have to kneel before the memorial of our fallen teammate. Yet a group of people do not have the courage to hold anyone accountable for his death. If only they could have the courage that Jordan had. It’s never the wrong time to do what’s right. pic.twitter.com/AaZVmLGTtS

— Ellis McKennie (@emck_cubed97) October 30, 2018

Loh and several members of the board did not respond to interview requests.

The decision to initially retain Durkin came on the heels of a lengthy report that stopped short of calling the culture of the football program toxic. It did, however, highlight a dysfunctional athletics department with insufficient accountability and oversight. Within that culture, where people feared speaking out, problems were allowed to fester. The report highlights, for example, the aggressive behavior of Rick Court, a former strength-and-conditioning coach, who at one point threw a “trash can full of vomit” at players, according to the report. (Court resigned in August amid the fallout over McNair’s death.)

Loh was not unscathed by the investigation, which showed that he had received an anonymous email, in 2016, about the abusive environment in athletics – well before McNair’s death.

Football Over Academics?

Despite drawing his own public ire over the course of the controversy, Loh emerged from it as a symbol of academic purity, brought down by a football-crazed culture of big-money boosters and compromised regents. That narrative surely understated the president’s own responsibility for reining in the university’s chaotic athletics program, but it resonated at an emotionally fraught moment when people connected to Maryland craved gestures of moral responsibility and fierce accountability.

State Delegate Erek L. Barron, a Democrat who represents Prince George’s County, said in an interview on Tuesday night that he was troubled by reports that Loh had been forced out because he opposed keeping Durkin on as head coach, echoing views that were widely pronounced throughout Wednesday.

“I think it sends a really bad message all around that we appear to be valuing football over academics and all the other things that a university is about,” he said.

Durkin had a hefty contract, which will cost the university upward of $5 million to buy out, according to news reports.

With its reversal of the Durkin decision, the university may have quelled significant outrage. Even so, by meddling in a personnel decision about an individual coach, the board may have run afoul of widely accepted governance standards. The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges is clear on this point.

“Boards should not be directly involved in the process of hiring and firing coaches or other athletics-department personnel,” the association said in a formal statement on boards’ responsibilities.

In a statement on Wednesday, before Durkin’s dismissal was announced, the University System of Maryland defended the board’s actions without mentioning what pressures may have been brought to bear.

“As the Association of Governing Boards’ policy makes clear, governing boards have a responsibility to hold presidents accountable for their oversight of university athletics departments,” the system’s statement says. “Presidents, according to that same policy, bear ‘ultimate responsibility’ for the conduct and control of the athletics department.

“As the independent commission’s investigation revealed in great detail, the athletics department at the University of Maryland, College Park, was in disarray for several years. As a result, the USM Board of Regents had the responsibility to provide recommendations and guidance to the president. The board carried out that responsibility with the primary focus on what was best for the university and the students.”

Robert L. Caret, the system’s chancellor, declined an interview request.

Christopher S. Walsh, chairman of the Faculty Senate at College Park, echoed the widely held governance concerns. “It is the view of the University Senate leadership that the Board of Regents has stepped into making personnel decisions based on suspect motivations. If they can take such action regarding a coach, they can certainly do the same with a faculty member, a staff member, a department or program, or an administrator.”

‘Red Line That Gets Crossed’

Despite the university’s change of course, the events at Maryland call to mind past episodes in higher education when it appeared a college president’s fortunes were tied to that of a football coach. Few have articulated those fraught dynamics quite like E. Gordon Gee, who, as president of Ohio State University, joked that Jim Tressel, then the Buckeyes football coach, had the power to fire Gee — not the other way around.

“I’m just hopeful that the coach doesn’t dismiss me,” Gee told reporters after Tressel was suspended for a major rules violation.

The quip caused some backlash for Gee, who now is president of West Virginia University, but it spoke to the problematic power dynamics on college campuses with big-time athletics. Those situations are ripe for interference from board members, Gee said, and that may well have been the case at Maryland.

“Either let me be in charge or fire me, but don’t tell me what to do in areas where I have responsibility, particularly with issues of integrity confronting the university,” Gee said in an interview on Wednesday. “That seems to me to be the red line that gets crossed. Unfortunately, at least optically, that’s what happened” at Maryland.

The job of a president, Gee continued, is all the more difficult when board members are inserting themselves into personnel issues. It’s difficult, if not impossible, in those cases to focus on the task at hand, he said.

“That’s trouble,” Gee said. “And I think Wallace Loh was right in the middle of that.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling,or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Correction (11/1/2018, 7:55 a.m.): An earlier version of this article referred to DJ Durkin as having resigned. The text has been updated to say that he was fired.