Behold, the Decade of Monsters and Men

In the bleary-eyed hours of January 1, 2010, the nation’s colleges and universities were suffering the equivalent of a 10-martini economic hangover. The Great Recession had wreaked its havoc on endowment returns, and there was talk of a grand reordering of the higher-education landscape.

Closures. Mergers. Death by a thousand budget cuts.

Some of that happened, to be sure. But there was another, far worse, menace lurking at the dawn of the decade. None of us saw it coming. At first, we saw only its shadowy outlines — its grotesque form indistinguishable. It wasn’t until the spring of 2011 that the picture started to appear. We heard about it in a letter.

“Dear Colleague,” it began.

The return address should have tipped us off that something was wrong. Mail from the Office for Civil Rights is seldom good news. It brings sweat to the palms, like the glimpse of flashing police lights in a rear-view mirror.

There should have been nothing revelatory about what the letter said. There was a sexual-assault problem on college campuses. We knew that or should have known that. Still, it felt like something had changed. We were on notice.

There was so much, though, that we had yet to see. A woman walking across Columbia University’s campus with a 50-pound mattress on her shoulder. Bill Cosby in handcuffs. A hashtag next to the words “MeToo.”

Something terrible was just over the horizon. When he emerged, hulking and grinning like some crazed jack-o’-lantern — why was this man always smiling? — we shouldn’t have been so damned surprised. But, of course, we were: Jerry Sandusky, Penn State’s former defensive coordinator, was being crammed into a police car and charged with serial acts of child molestation.

We had not, on that November day in 2011, been in the habit yet of reading Graham B. Spanier’s emails. We had not seen in plain type how the former Penn State president mused with his colleagues about whether it was a good idea to report to the authorities that Sandusky had been spotted in a locker-room shower with a young boy. We had not seen how the men agreed with Spanier, who surmised that “the only downside” would be if Sandusky did it again, and then they’d “become vulnerable for having not reported it.” They would become vulnerable.

There was still so much we hadn’t seen. More time would pass before we got the first glimpse of something seriously wrong at Baylor University. A sordid culture of coaches hushing up sexual-assault accusers, as investigators would later tell us they had done at Baylor, took years to surface.

If we were dubious before 2010 about the potentially corrupting influence of big-time sports on higher education, the first half of our dark decade suggested that maybe we weren’t dubious enough. It was jarring, though, to see the plague of sexual assault begin appearing in campus doctors’ offices.

In the early 2010s, when the most destabilizing force in higher education seemed to be the prospect of Massive Open Online Courses, would any of us have believed that, by decade’s end, there would be three separate university doctors accused of assaulting their patients? Could we have envisioned Larry Nassar at Michigan State or George Tyndall at Southern California or Richard Strauss at Ohio State?

Probably not.

But nor could we have envisioned Rachael Denhollander or Kaylee Lorincz, women who stepped forward to demand accountability from Michigan State for its failures to protect them from Nassar — even as the university’s interim president, John Engler, insulted them. (He’s gone now. They’re not).

The 2010s prepared us to see things we never expected to see, things we never wanted to see. That doesn’t make it any easier. It is still shocking to behold Lou Anna K. Simon, the erstwhile Michigan State president, seated behind a defendant’s table, charged with lying to the police about what she knew about Nassar. But if this distressing decade has taught us anything, it’s that we have no choice.

We can’t look away anymore.

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