Northwestern went to the Rose Bowl in 1996. My strongest memory of that season is a co-worker, knowing that I’m an NU graduate, naively asking if I would be attending the big game in Pasadena.
“Well ...” I responded, amused that someone could imagine I might, “given that I never went to a football game in the four years I was a student there, it’s kinda late to start now.”
Why didn’t I go? The honest answer is: Going never crossed my mind. Campus culture in Evanston had a distinct hierarchy, with Greek life, sports and money at the top, and the rest of us, supernumeraries filling in the background. We were admitted, given a break on tuition and tolerated. But it wasn’t as if the university was about us.
Part of this might have been my personal outlook. I never went to games, didn’t own a Northwestern T-shirt. The school evoked in me a sort of lip-curled contempt that only got worse, in part thanks to episodes like the current Wildcat hazing scandal.
Indifference was the school’s business model. During my four years, I saw the president of Northwestern, Robert Strotz, exactly twice. At the opening prayer welcoming freshmen. And at graduation. The rest of the time I assumed he was busy attending to Northwestern’s primary purpose: building the school’s endowment. That was the entire point of the endeavor. The students were just afterthoughts, widgets, products on which the money was made.
This is a harsh view, and I know classmates who would disagree. Classmates who give money to the school, for instance, which to me is just unfathomable. I did have wonderful teachers, learned German literature from Erich Heller, international relations from Richard W. Leopold, magazine writing from Abe Peck.
The campus is lovely. I don’t want to tar the place with too broad a brush. I went to NU purely for the Medill School of Journalism; it served me well, and I must laud the reporters at The Daily Northwestern who revealed the “absolutely egregious and vile and inhumane” hazing that NU administrators winked at.
Plus, my undergraduate years were a particularly lousy period in a perennially defeated football program. Northwestern only won one football game between 1978 and 1982.
Which may color my approach to the latest scandal. The sexual, physical and mental abuse allegations would be bad enough at Ohio State. But Northwestern? It evokes the truism that academic battles are so bitter because the stakes are so small.
The coaches obviously felt this kind of abuse is how you make a winning football team, and they’re obviously wrong, since NU is 60 and 62 over the past decade, under cashiered coach Pat Fitzgerald, who went 1 and 11 last season.
If I could communicate one thing to NU administrators — and I doubt they’re listening, which is how you blunder into these messes in the first place; but let’s pretend — I’d say: “Read the room.”
Ever watch “Ted Lasso”? Any idea what it’s about? No? I’ll tell you. It’s about kindness. An American football coach goes to England to coach a soccer club. With caring and empathy. Viewers loved it. Yes, it’s fiction.
But there’s a lesson there. Imagine how they’d react if Coach Lasso walked whistling by some mock rape being staged in the locker room to punish a player slow on his wind sprints.
Guess what? They wouldn’t like it. If Fitzgerald were able to play the video of his big “If you do this sort of stuff, you’re off the team” talk, he wouldn’t have been forced out in disgrace.
None of this is complicated. Here, I’ll set your priorities: 1. Students. 2. The big honking hedge fund/nostalgia machine that is Northwestern. 3. The Daily Northwestern. 4. Football.
Does that help? I didn’t think so.
The sad part is this has happened before, in previous scandals that always boil down to NU administrators ignoring obvious problems. I sat in on a 2015 NU freshman orientation and remember being shocked when the subject of student drinking came up.
It was presented as some kind of baffling new concern just now appearing on the school radar, one they were frantically trying to develop a strategy toward. These problems are perennial at Northwestern because they never get fixed.
C’mon guys. Where’s the passion for excellence you demand from your students?
