The Northwestern hazing scandal

This looks like an extraordinarily ugly story, especially given that the code of silence that surrounds these sorts of institutions makes it likely that we haven’t heard the half of it:

It’s the thing that coaches say when they want to make a show of taking responsibility for something unpleasant involving their teams, whether it’s a loss on the football field or a player’s misconduct on the street: It starts with me.

Northwestern should have used that as a guide when punishing Pat Fitzgerald for a hazing scandal that occurred on his watch as head football coach. Instead, the school suspended him for two weeks in July, which is like suspending a bear during hibernation. That slap on the wrist Friday led to waves of criticism crashing upon Northwestern. A day later, drenched university president Michael Schill announced that he would reconsider Fitzgerald’s discipline.

To sum up, a football coach allegedly didn’t know that some of his players were dry-humping teammates, usually freshmen, as sadistic punishment for practice or game mistakes, and a school had to scramble to think about a harsher penalty for a coach apparently unaware something so ugly was going on in his program.

Pathetic, all the way around.

If everything indeed starts with the coach, then NU needs to fire Fitzgerald. If the school really does put the well-being of its students first, then it needs to find someone else to run the football program. And if the university’s trustees are paying attention to this very public mess, they might want to take a hard look at the man handing out two-week vacations that are masquerading as suspensions.

It took the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, to bring to light what the school chose not to after a six-month investigation that it had authorized. According to an anonymous former NU player, the football team engaged in a practice called “running.” Eight to 10 teammates would dry-hump a restrained player in a dark locker room as punishment for a mistake made during a game or practice.

“It’s a shocking experience as a freshman to see your fellow freshmen teammates get ran, but then you see everybody bystanding in the locker room,” the former player told the newspaper. “It’s just a really abrasive and barbaric culture that has permeated throughout that program for years on end now.”

BTW Michael Schill — a truly Dickensian name for a big time university president — got his start in the world of upper university administration as the dean of the University of Chicago Law School, so you know that a lot of RIGOR went into his initial decision to gesture at slapping Fitzgerald’s wrist before hitting only air.

It probably says something about something that these hazing rituals in hyper-masculine cultures like college football so often have some sadistic homoerotic content, to complement the extreme overt homophobia of the cultures themselves.