In recent years several well-known universities have been at the center of horrific acts perpetrated by employees that have harmed students, tarnished institutional reputations, and resulted in millions of dollars in expenses and settlements. The list includes:
- Michigan State University, which paid victims over $500 million and spent over $60 million on legal fees associated with the former doctor Larry Nassar, who assaulted hundreds of university and outside athletes.
- Ohio State University, which spent over $75 million in legal fees and payments to approximately 200 victims of Richard Strauss, who was accused of assaulting them in his role as a team doctor.
- Pennsylvania State University, which spent over $300 million in legal fees and settlement costs stemming from the former football coach Jerry Sandusky’s assaults on young boys on campus.
- The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which paid victims of the campus doctor Robert E. Anderson, who treated many athletes, almost half a billion dollars.
- The University of Southern California, which paid $1.1 billion to the victims of the campus gynecologist George Tyndall, who assaulted hundreds of women over the course of decades.
Michigan State University, where the Nassar scandal took place, is now facing another scandal. Its football coach, Mel Tucker, who just two years ago was awarded a $95-million, 10-year contract — the second-largest among NCAA coaches — was fired last month for sexual misconduct. Tucker allegedly masturbated during a phone call with Brenda Tracy, herself a survivor of sexual assault by athletes when she was a student at the University of Oregon 25 years ago. She had been hired to provide training against sexual assault to the members of his football team. (Tucker has said his relationship with Tracy was consensual, which she denies.)
The careful reader will note that all five of those institutions have nationally prominent athletic programs, and at four of the five (all but USC) the scandals were explicitly tied to athletics. But it is too easy to blame big athletic programs for a culture that enabled those scandals.
The University of San Francisco is a Division I institution in a midmajor conference, but it has no football program, and athletics play a very minor role on campus. And yet this university too has had its share of problems in its sports programs, including a head baseball coach who was fired for creating an “intolerable sexualized environment,” a (still-employed) head women’s basketball coach whose “intentional infliction of emotional distress” on a player resulted in a $750,000 jury award, and a men’s soccer program that harbored 11 players “accused of engaging in sexual misconduct over the past decade,” according to a university investigation.
Leaders must take action even when there are only rumors of bad behavior.
In every one of the cases at those six universities, complaints — either formal or informal — had been filed by victims or other employees of the institution who had raised questions about the behavior of the perpetrators. But in every case the problems continued for years, and in some cases decades, before the universities took action to deal with them and truly listen to the victims.
I was associated with four of the institutions, having been a professor at the University of Michigan, a professor and research-center director at Penn State, a college dean at Michigan State, and the provost at the University of San Francisco. I have witnessed proclamations of zero-tolerance policies, the establishment of whistle-blower hotlines and anonymous reporting websites, and trainings on sexual harassment and how to establish a safe and supportive workplace.
But none of those actions can substitute for strong and proactive institutional leadership, leadership that reacts swiftly and forcefully to signs something inappropriate is happening. Leaders must take action even when there are only rumors of bad behavior; they can’t wait around for victims to file formal complaints. Too often administrators get paralyzed by arguments of due process, the need to protect the rights of the accused, and the importance of adhering to human-resources policies.
Leaders might be afraid that if they move too quickly to suspend or fire an accused employee, they will face a lawsuit alleging the employee’s rights have been violated. That is a risk, but it is hard to imagine that any suit of this type could cost institutions — in legal fees and any potential judgment or settlement, not to mention bad publicity — anywhere near what they have ultimately paid out after the assaults have gone on for years and involved scores or even hundreds of victims in the wake of ignored or neglected information.
Institutional structure can play a role too. At the University of San Francisco, the athletics program reports to neither the president nor the provost, both of whom have responsibility for the academic and co-curricular standards and lives of students, but to the vice president for business and finance, a position that has no responsibility for students. It’s hard not to think that a different structure would have provided more proactive and intensive oversight, and possibly would have prevented the problems there.
In the Mel Tucker case, Michigan State received a complaint from Brenda Tracy last December and hired an outside lawyer to conduct an investigation, a report of which it received on July 25. The report, which has not yet been made public, is said to have confirmed some of Tracy’s allegations, and recommended the university hold a hearing to determine if Tucker’s actions violated Michigan State policies. But the university opted not to schedule a hearing until October 5, over two months later. By that point, Tucker would have led the football team’s preseason practices and would have coached it through five of its 12 games.
It wasn’t until USA Today published a story about the case on September 10, almost seven weeks after the investigator’s report was complete, that the university apparently took any action against Tucker, suspending him without pay. Only eight days after his suspension, Michigan State informed Tucker it was firing him.
The optics in the case are very clear. When university leaders believed that the allegations against Tucker would be kept quiet, it appears they were content to allow him to stay in his job and lead the 117 athletes, nine coaches, and 38 staff members of the football team. But once the story went public, they were somehow able to gather enough information to fire him for cause in a little over a week. That raises the question: Why didn’t university leaders move more quickly when they first read the investigator’s report?
Presidents, provosts, vice presidents, and deans need to do more than just keep the proverbial trains running on time.
The university claims that neither the interim president, Teresa K. Woodruff, nor the athletics director, Alan Haller, nor any member of the Board of Trustees was aware of the details of the complaints against Tucker until USA Today published its article. That is a stunning admission, since those university leaders had had the report in hand for weeks — a report that was evidently highly critical of Michigan State’s most visible and top-paid employee.
Leadership matters. Presidents, provosts, vice presidents, and deans need to do more than just keep the proverbial trains running on time. They need to be willing and able to act swiftly and decisively when they learn that members of their community may be at risk. Yes, they must act within existing laws and institutional policies, but the latter are often subject to a fair amount of latitude and interpretation.
Some leaders have been willing to act more swiftly. In the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, in 2019, some institutions moved to immediately fire the coaches involved before their cases were adjudicated. At the University of Southern California, the water-polo coach and a senior associate athletics director were both immediately dismissed after being charged with accepting bribes from parents or from Rick Singer, the Varsity Blues mastermind.
At Stanford, the sailing coach was also fired immediately upon his indictment for allegedly taking bribes in return for placing unqualified students on his team. Both universities chose to fire the offending employees rather than place them on leave until they were brought to trial.
Often after one of these scandals occurs and the fallout becomes public, people in higher education tell themselves that it will create a sea change in how such issues are handled. And yet they keep happening. They will continue to do so until college leaders step up and act more quickly and decisively to open an investigation upon the first whisper of a problem. It does cost money, time, and energy to lead in this fashion. It can result in bad publicity for a college. But in the end, heading off what could become a major scandal is a much better outcome — not just for the institution but for any victims and potential future victims too.
