You may have picked up the stench from East Lansing, Michigan where the outrageous behavior of Dr. Larry Nassar recently came to the surface and is now followed by allegations of innumerable sexual attacks against women by members of the university’s basketball and football teams. Dr. Nasser has been sentenced to 175 years in prison for his behavior involving Olympic athletes as the flowing clip from CNN reveals:
(CNN)Once a world-renowned sports physician treating America’s foremost Olympic women gymnasts, Larry Nassar now will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The disgraced former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison, a judge announced Wednesday, after more than 150 women and girls said in court that he sexually abused them over the past two decades.“I’ve just signed your death warrant,” Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said in a Lansing, Michigan, courtroom. “I find that you don’t get it, that you’re a danger. That you remain a danger.”Nassar had pleaded guilty to seven counts of criminal sexual conduct in Ingham County in Michigan and admitted to using his trusted medical position to assault and molest girls under the guise of medical treatment.
Imagine that: 150 women testified against this man who has shown little remorse that raises deep questions about the man’s mental stability, among other things.
But the aftermath at Michigan State, where Dr. Nasser was team physician for many years, raises even more questions. It has all the hallmarks of the Penn State investigations not too long ago involving charges of sexual attacks on young boys by a member of the Penn State football staff. The fundamental problems here are twofold: (1) The University feigns ignorance regarding victims of alleged attacks, and reporting those attacks is not encouraged; moreover, when attacks are reported they are not taken seriously. (2) The culture of secrecy that surround the athletics programs which are laws unto themselves. Attacks are investigated by campus police who then report to the Athletics Director as do those young women who allege attacks. The Athletics Director is then charged with following up those charges and punishing the attackers when found guilty. But, as can be imagined, the in-house investigations give every appearance of a cover-up and the University continually denies the charges, as do the basketball and football coaches who, if they did not know of the attacks (which is doubtful) certainly should have.
In any event, we have here the resounding echoes of the seemingly endless number of scandals that would appear to rock college campuses where the sports teams are laws unto themselves and just when we think public reports of the latest scandal would surely end the nightmare, it passes as just another incident reported in the news and quickly forgotten. The genie is out of the bottle on college campuses where Division I athletics are King. And it is not clear, given the amounts of money involved in sports at that level, that the genie can be put back into the bottle. On the contrary.
As a life-long educator this bothers me on so many levels. I have spent my life dedicated to the ideal of education as the process of freeing young minds and have always regarded college as the place where the process finds its highest expression. I have no problem with sports, having played them all my life and having been a certified teaching professional in tennis and a collegiate tennis coach for many years. But as an educator I have always thought that sports should take their place in the college and university hierarchy well below the ideals of educating young minds.
But at the Division I level of NCAA sports this is clearly not the case where education comes after all the money is counted and the bills are paid — and folks are paid off, apparently. The corruption in itself is an object lesson, one would think, but like so many object-lessons this one is not learned — even in the hallowed halls of academe where history is still taught. We hear and read about these things going on and then return to business as usual. Nothing changes and the problems persist.
hughcurtler 
Thank you.
Good post, my friend. The question that keeps playing over and over in my mind is : how many more? It would be highly unrealistic to assume that Penn State and University of Michigan are the only two schools where this take s place on a routing basis. Remember the Brock Turner case on the Stanford University campus and the slap on the wrist he received from the judge? I am convinced that we have seen only the tip of the iceberg and that it is much more widespread that anybody believes. Enter Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education, who has reversed prior policies on campus sexual assault, claiming the rights of the accused are being infringed upon. Say WHAT???
No doubt. This problem is widespread and it involves not only athletes, but others as well. It’s only the gigantic scandals that get the attention. I feel sorry for the many young women who are afraid to report the abuse all across the country.