Coach K Defends Campus Due Process

In many ways the lacrosse case that hit the Duke campus was a perfect storm. A media that (thanks to the botched Samiha Khanna interview in the N&O and then the Times’ initial biased coverage) portrayed the affair as a brutal example of racism. A corrupt local prosecutor who positioned himself as a latter-day Atticus Finch. A diversity-obsessed faculty whose “activist” members were more than willing to play the race card against anyone who opposed them, even as they violated Duke rules and procedures to get their way. And a president who was at best intimidated by his own faculty and at worst a willing accomplice of the faculty mob.

In this environment, perhaps no one could have provided the voice of reason. Yet the voice of arguably the most powerful person on the Duke campus, men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, was conspicuously silent in the initial weeks of the case. The co-author of several books on leadership, Krzyzewski refrained from all public comment on the case until late June 2006, eleven weeks after President Brodhead had fired coach Mike Pressler and issued a guilt-presuming public statement, and nine weeks after Brodhead had traveled to the Durham Chamber of Commerce to say of the accused lacrosse players, “If our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough.”

In his June 2006 remarks, Krzyzewski said, “If you're going to be in here for the long run, you're going to have trying times. That's just what happens, whether it's a business, a family or a university if you're in it for the long haul." Of the accused players, the coach said, “What I've tried to do behind the scenes is say, 'We're with you. We'll see what happens, and whatever happened if you did it, you should be punished.’” (From everything I learned in the case, whatever behind-the-scenes support Krzyzewski provided to the falsely accused players was very, very quiet indeed.) The sports blog Deadspin mockingly characterized the remarks in the following way: “Blue Devils basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski has spoken out in full solidarity, um, in utter opposition, ah, in lukewarm, half-hearted support of the Duke players in this high-profile controversy.”

Such rhetoric, the coach concluded, was consistent with a university’s values: “Giving support does not mean you're choosing sides. Giving support is what a university should do ... because we're in the kid business.” Of course, the leadership that was needed on the Duke campus in spring 2006 was not giving support (if the players were guilty, why would they have deserved the support of the men’s basketball coach, whether or not he was in the “kid business”?), but speaking out on behalf of fairness—ensuring that Duke faculty treated all students fairly, and ensuring that Durham authorities treated all Duke students fairly.

Krzyzewski made no such statements while the case was ongoing. He gave somewhat contradictory reasons for this approach. In an interview with the AP, he said that he decided to privately “lend whatever guidance or insights I might have into the situation,” including to President Brodheead, because “I am the basketball coach. I'm not the president, I'm not the athletic director and I'm not on the Board of Trustees and don't want to be.” (If, in fact, Krzyzewski did privately advise Brodhead, he either saw his advice completely rejected or gave very bad advice.) In an August 2006 interview with Time, however, the coach implied that he had remained silent to help the players, since “in [the Durham] area, I am like a lightning rod for some things, because there are a lot of Carolina fans or whatever.” And by March 2007, in an interview with Bob Costas, the coach enhanced his recollection again: “I met with my college president. I told Dick Brodhead, 'If you need me ... you tell me, and then put me in a position where I'm not the basketball coach. But I am that special assistant to you.’ Dick Brodhead did not bring me in.”

Krzyzewski eventually did criticize the Group of 88, though not until the spring of 2007, and only once he realized that the Group’s statement targeted not only the lacrosse players but also indicated “a latent hostility or whatever you want to say towards sports on campus. I thought it was inappropriate, to be quite frank." And he issued by far the most gracious statement of anyDuke administrator once the case imploded, when he commented after Nifong’s disbarment, “The Lacrosse Community, the Pressler Family, the Danowskis, there's some real heroes, but the main heroes are those kids and their families.”

Yet at no point in the lacrosse case did Krzyzewski issue a public statement on behalf of due process—urging Duke administrators to ensure that all Duke students were treated according to the rules by Durham authorities and by Duke professors, or that Duke administrators avoid precipitous action until the facts were clearer.

Why revisit Krzyzewski’s silence on lacrosse case due process? Because CNN reports that in an interview to appear tomorrow, the coach will criticize Penn State’s board of trustees for acting too hastily in firing longtime coach Joe Paterno. Penn State, said Krzyzewski, made a “real mistake” in how it handled affairs; “it was really not well done.” He continued, “You had somebody who’d given six decades of service to the university and done such an incredible job. Somehow, you have to let—something has to play out and respect the fact that you’ve gone through all these experiences for six decades. And it doesn’t just go out the window, right at the end.”

Penn State’s trustees faced an extraordinarily difficult decision regarding Paterno’s fate when the indictments of the school’s AD, security chief, and former football defensive coordinator came down. Viewing the facts the Trustees had through the lens most favorable to Paterno, the coach (a) had received a report of a horrific crime by his former chief assistant, waited a day before phoning his AD about it, and then never followed up on the report even as his former chief assistant continued to frequent the football facilities; (b) had, despite his prominence in State College, no knowledge of the 1998 police investigation into another child sex abuse claim against Jerry Sandusky; and (c) did not notice Sandusky bringing along one of his sexual-abuse alleged victims to a 1998 bowl game. Finally, and again assuming facts in the most favorable light toward Paterno, the trustees would have needed to believe that Sandusky's abrupt resignation as defensive coordinator in 1999 was not motivated by hopes of distancing the football program from Sandusky following the 1998 investigation.

With these (and especially item a) as the facts viewed most favorably to Paterno, it seems to me Penn State’s trustees acted properly, though I can see how people of good faith could disagree. It would seem odd, however, for someone who didn’t criticize his own university’s trustees and administrators for not upholding due process to then criticize another school’s under the circumstances that Penn State faced in November.

Moreover, even if someone believed in November that the trustees mistreated Paterno, virtually every piece of information that’s emerged since then has placed Paterno in a less flattering light. In the late coach’s only interview aboutthe affair, he suggested that when he first heard of the allegations against Sandusky, he couldn’t even conceive of them, since “I never heard of, of, rape and a man.” To accept that statement required believing that Paterno—a high-profile Catholic who made large donations to Catholic causes—had never heard of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic church in the United States.


Then, an Esquire article offered tantalizing, if circumstantial, evidence that Paterno might in fact have known of the 1998 investigation into Sandusky.


And finally, reports in recent days have suggested that in 2001, Paterno’s nominal superiors (whom he had faced down in 2004 when they urged him to retire) extensively discussed the charges against Sandusky, and made a conscious—and probably illegal—decision not to report the allegations.

Given all that, it seems remarkable that Krzyzewski still believes that the Penn State trustees should have kept Paterno as their coach for the rest of the 2011 season—all the more so given his disinclination to publicly support due process or criticize his own school’s administrators during the lacrosse case.