The president of Binghamton University, Lois B. DeFleur, acknowledged on Friday that there were “missteps” in the university’s quest to build an elite Division I athletics program, The Ithaca Journal reported. The admission came one week after the release of a 99-page report detailing widespread problems in the State University of New York campus’s athletics department. The report, based on a four-month investigation, raised concerns about how athletes were admitted to the university and how they performed in and out of the classroom once enrolled. “It is now obvious that there were missteps in developing this program,” Ms. DeFleur, who steps down in July, said in an e-mail statement to people on the campus. She added that top officials at Binghamton “intend to address” those missteps but did not specify how.
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2 Responses to SUNY-Binghamton President Admits ‘Missteps’ in Troubled Athletics Program
goxewu - February 23, 2010 at 8:01 am
President DeFleur’s use of the weasel word “missteps” is damningly revealing.A “misstep” connotes an inadvertent and/or minor mistake made in the course of doing something legitimate, e.g., “I should have talked to the transportation people before scheduling the field trip; that was a misstep on my part.”If President DeFleur had wanted to tell the truth, she might have said instead: “We desperately wanted the booster money, TV exposure and reflected glory that a school supposedly gets from a big-time men’s basketball program, so we did whatever it took to build one, to hell with the rules or ethics. And as president, I was in on the whole thing. If that player hadn’t gotten caught in a drug deal, we’d still be going full speed ahead, and I’d be sitting courtside and getting interviewed on ESPN. Now we’ve got egg on our face and we’re scrambling to paper this whole corrupt mess over with bureaucratic language like ‘missteps,’ committees, investigations and all that delaying stuff that we hope will keep things quiet until the public forgets about the scandal. Too bad we’re in a legal bind that makes us pay a quarter of a million bucks a year to a suspended basketball coach, but that’s one of the prices you pay for trying to become a jock school. I’m sure happy to be able to desert the sinking ship in July and drop the debacle in somebody else’s lap.”
dmledwin - February 23, 2010 at 9:38 am
Why do all of the university comments and news stories say these things occurred in their effort to build a Div. I “program”? All I have read about is their effort to build a Div. I men’s basketball program. Have there been issues in other sports? Haven’t heard about them. What about their women’s basketball team? Not a word. There is a real disingenuousness on the part of the university to label this a “program-wide” effort…