Congratulations to Bob Huggins, who, on Wednesday, officially became the most powerful person in the state of West Virginia. That might have unofficially been the case for years, but West Virginia University has now laid it out formally for the world to see.
In deciding to retain and moderately penalize its Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach in the wake of him crassly using an anti-LGBTQ slur on a Cincinnati radio station Monday, WVU made its pecking order clear. Nobody else at the university could have gotten away with that casual public spewing of hate speech and kept their job with relatively minor repercussions. Nor could any politician, coal baron or other leader in the state.
WVU is reducing Huggins’s 2022–23 salary from $4.15 million to $3.15 million, still a rather handsome living wage for a 69-year-old in the state of West Virginia, with the $1 million reduction “used to directly support WVU's LGBTQ+ Center, the Carruth Center and other state and national organizations that support marginalized communities.”
