From the issue dated March 26, 2004
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How One President Fielded a Football CrisisFaced with a scandal over sex and recruiting, U. of Colorado chief has moved into the spotlight
At a crowded Congressional subcommittee hearing in Washington this month, the panel's chairman, Rep. Clifford B. Stearns, peered down from the dais at Elizabeth Hoffman, president of the University of Colorado System, and demanded that she and other college leaders account for what he saw as athletics-recruiting programs gone wild. Ms. Hoffman, sitting at the witness table in a black business suit, met his questions with a direct gaze and swift reply: "Mr. Chairman, I have taken control and brought about accountability. I have demonstrated that I have control." It is a message that she has been forced to repeat in recent weeks, through words and actions, amid public questioning of her ability to manage the crisis. After reports that Colorado and other institutions have used sex to recruit athletes, her university's Boulder campus has become emblematic of inappropriate behavior in college athletics. Three women have filed federal lawsuits against the University of Colorado, charging that they were raped by football players or recruits from the Boulder campus in 2001 and that the university used the promise of sex to help lure recruits. A total of seven women have come forward to say that they were raped by Colorado athletes or recruits since 1997. No criminal charges have been filed, but the accusations have spurred an examination at colleges nationwide of practices such as taking recruits to strip clubs and the use of female undergraduates as "hostesses" in recruiting athletes. Ms. Hoffman has faced criticism from some lawmakers, alumni, and faculty members over her handling of the crisis. A few professors and politicians believe she should have acted swiftly to fire the university's athletics officials and football coach, rather than only putting the coach on leave. Some athletics boosters think she has unfairly singled out athletes for behavior that occurs throughout the university. But the Board of Regents and many other lawmakers and professors, including faculty leaders, praise her for a deliberate and evenhanded approach to investigating the problems and taking steps to fix them, even while she has kept up the battle to get more money from the state legislature. She also has the support of the university's Board of Regents. "This is very, very complicated," Ms. Hoffman said last week. "I'm concerned about the fact that some of these cases go back seven years, and no charges have ever been filed. So I don't know who to believe." Political Tactics Betsy Hoffman is a career academic. After earning a bachelor's degree from Smith College and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, both in medieval history, she went on to receive a second doctorate in economics from the California Institute of Technology. She spent a couple of decades as a respected scholar at Northwestern and Purdue Universities, the Universities of Wyoming and Arizona, and as dean at Iowa State University. As provost of the University of Illinois at Chicago in the late 1990s, she worked to turn the campus into an academic powerhouse, recruiting such star professors as Stanley Fish, who became dean of the university's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She acknowledges a steep learning curve when she became president of Colorado in September 2000. Yet she has been a quick study in running a university system and mastering the intricacies of political lobbying, according to professors, regents, and higher-education experts. The accusations about football recruiting, however, have thrown Ms. Hoffman, 57, into the national spotlight. The president's handling of the athletics scandal became a news sensation in late January. Colorado's governor, Bill Owens, demanded in a press release that the university investigate the accusations. "The university administration understands the gravity of these charges," he said. "I look forward to a complete and detailed accounting of the facts." Since then, Ms. Hoffman and the regents have appointed a committee to investigate the rape accusations and recruiting problems, and they hired John DiBiaggio, a former president of Tufts University, to work with the committee and as a liaison between the campus athletics department and the university administration. This month Ms. Hoffman put in place strict new recruiting policies. Among other requirements, prospective athletes now must be accompanied by their parents or a coach throughout recruiting visits to a campus and comply with an 11 p.m. curfew. The university eliminated the practice of allowing student hosts to spend unsupervised time with recruits. "Our vision is to become a national leader for a culture of personal respect and responsibility in our football and athletics programs and throughout the campus," Ms. Hoffman told the Congressional panel. "We will not tolerate sexual harassment or exploitation in our athletics department or anywhere in our university." Some higher-education experts praise the steps that Ms. Hoffman has taken in recent weeks, although they say she was slow to publicly take charge of the situation. Back in Colorado last week, Ms. Hoffman said she would have preferred to handle the problems privately, but the governor's statements to the press forced her to play a public role. "When the governor stepped in and called into question the leadership and the ability of the university to manage its own affairs, I really had no choice," she said in an interview in her white Cadillac as she drove from Boulder, where her main office is located, to her second office in Denver. "The governor was going on national TV and questioning my ability to manage this process." She held a news conference to counter his accusations and has not slowed since then in giving interviews and making national-television appearances to communicate the university's positions and actions in dealing with the football scandal. At one point in February, as more women were surfacing with sexual-assault accusations, her office was receiving dozens of phone calls a day from reporters who wanted interviews. The day she placed Gary Barnett, the football coach, on administrative leave, she had calls from all the network morning-news shows, including Good Morning, America, all wanting her to appear. The university system called in public-relations officers from several of its campuses to help field all the queries. Oversight of athletics is technically the responsibility of Colorado's campus chancellors. The university's Board of Regents removed athletics from the system head's purview back in the early 1990s, during the stormy presidency of Judith E.N. Albino, which was plagued by personality clashes with the board. While the president is now the public representative of the university, who hobnobs with alumni and boosters at important games, administrative oversight of the sports programs belongs to the chancellors. "In retrospect, to make organizational and systemic decisions because of a personality issue comes back to haunt you for years to come," Ms. Hoffman said of the regents' decision during Ms. Albino's presidency. "As we move through the reform process, we're obviously going to have to do some things to fix this situation." Even without the formal responsibility for athletics, Ms. Hoffman said, she had begun working on steps to reform recruiting with the Boulder campus's chancellor, Richard L. Byyny, before the governor's statement in January. She had become concerned when female students reported that they had been raped by football players or recruits at an off-campus party in December 2001. It was then that Ms. Hoffman learned that the chancellor, university lawyers, and athletics officials had met in 1998 with prosecutors from the Boulder County district attorney's office following a high-school student's report of being assaulted by two Boulder football recruits at another alcohol-laden party in late 1997. The current district attorney, Mary T. Keenan, who was then a county prosecutor, now says that she put the university "on notice" about concerns dealing with sex and alcohol in recruiting athletes at that 1998 meeting. Recently released documents show that Dr. Byyny (pronounced BIN-ee), a physician by training, had instructed athletics officials in January 1998 to develop new guidelines that prohibited the use of alcohol during recruiting activities, including those off campus. He also established procedures for handling complaints of sexual harassment and helping victims of assaults. But the guidelines put in place were not enough to prevent the events at the 2001 party, nor was a players' handbook developed in 1999 by Coach Barnett that included a warning about date rape. "We tried to learn from our experiences," Dr. Byyny said last week. "Sexual assault where alcohol is involved is all too common among college students." Sitting in her office with a view of the golden-domed capitol in Denver, Ms. Hoffman, a tall woman who played basketball in high school, said last week that the 2001 party "scared everybody," including the coach. "The chancellor and I, after getting a briefing about that party, took it very, very seriously, as did Gary Barnett," she said. In 2002, Dr. Byyny imposed a 1 a.m. curfew on recruits and created written behavioral expectations for the students who serve as their hosts. Meanwhile, the district attorney declined to file criminal charges of rape stemming from the 2001 party, just as she had filed no charges after the high-school student's rape accusation in 1997. Witnesses' testimony about that night in 2001 was conflicting, with some partygoers saying there had been consensual group sex, others corroborating the rape accusations, and all recollecting what had happened during an alcohol-tinged haze. Party Culture Boulder, a college town nestled in the foothills of the Rockies, is a study in contrasts. Many of the adults there pursue yoga, health-food, massage, and the latest Tibetan Buddhist route to chilling out. Many of the college students throw wild parties and drink to get staggeringly drunk. Indeed, the Boulder campus was ranked the No. 1 party school in the nation last year in an annual survey by the Princeton Review. Ms. Hoffman says the conflicting accounts of the 2001 party and the lack of criminal charges led her to reserve judgment about what happened. Racial factors have also caused her to tread carefully, she says. Boulder is a very white town, and many of its African-American residents are either current or former athletes at the university. All of the athletes who have been accused in the parties of 1997 and 2001 are black, while six of the seven women who have reported being sexually assaulted are white. The third lawsuit that was filed, by an African-American soccer player, differs from the other two because it focuses mainly on racial-discrimination charges involving the university's soccer program. "We had done a lot behind the scenes," Ms. Hoffman says of the university's response to the allegations. "I make a practice of not trying cases in the press." Budget Battles But the governor in late January accused her of listening more to the university's lawyers than to her public-relations officers. She, in turn, accused Mr. Owens, a Republican, of using the scandal as a publicity stunt to further his own political career, without even calling her first to discuss his concerns. Indeed, many of the players in the drama have political aims. Late last month the governor appointed the state's attorney general, Ken Salazar, as a special prosecutor to investigate the rape allegations and the athletics-recruiting scandal. This month Mr. Salazar announced his candidacy in the fall election for the U.S. Senate seat now open as Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell steps down. Mark Malone, chairman of the university system's Faculty Senate, notes that the university's board is the only public-college board in the state that the governor does not appoint. Its members are elected, so the governor has no power over them or over the university's president. That has often made the university an independent political force for the governor to reckon with, Mr. Malone says. During the past couple of years Ms. Hoffman has been pushing for even more autonomy. She wants the state's General Assembly to grant the university "enterprise status," which would make it a semiprivate institution with more independence over financial matters such as raising money and setting tuition rates. Even in the midst of the athletics scandal, she has continued to lobby for passage of a measure that would create a voucher system for students at the state's public and private colleges, bringing out pages of charts and graphs on the university's budget over lunches and dinners with state legislators. If the bill passes this spring, Ms. Hoffman says, the university's "enterprise status" is a done deal. The new status is essential for the university's financial future, she says. The university system now receives only about 10 percent of its funding from the state. After three years of significant cuts in money from the state, she says, the university needs more autonomy to manage its finances in order to maintain quality. Mr. Malone says most faculty members have praised the president's actions in the athletics crisis and her persistence in lobbying the legislature about the budget and the university's push for more financial autonomy. "People have a lot of respect for her and think she has a lot of integrity," he says. "You couldn't have a better person handling this." Ms. Hoffman says she has reshaped her daily schedule in recent weeks to face the crisis head-on. She says she has canceled all "nonessential" trips and appointments, in order to focus on her two priorities: solving the problems in athletics recruiting and lobbying the legislature about the budget. One of those canceled trips was a visit to a past major donor to the university. Some alumni donors criticize Ms. Hoffman for placing Mr. Barnett on administrative leave rather than firing him last month after he made denigrating comments about a former placekicker, Katie Hnida. "It's a guy's sport," he told the Rocky Mountain News. "Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible. OK? There's no other way to say it." His comments came in response to Ms. Hnida's report last month that she had been raped by a Colorado football player in 1999. That criticism of Ms. Hoffman was echoed in the hearing this month before the U.S. House of Representatives' commerce and consumer-protection subcommittee. Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who is the subcommittee's ranking minority member, called Ms. Hoffman's action "just a slap on the wrist." Ms. Hoffman was not given an opportunity to respond during the hearing, but she told reporters afterward that she stood by her decision to delay final action until the investigations by the regents' committee and the attorney general into the assault and recruiting allegations are complete. Her years as a scholar and now president have taught her to wait until she has all the information, she says. "I'm going to make those decisions when I have all the facts." CHRONOLOGY OF COLORADO'S CRISIS December 1997: A high-school student reports that she was raped at a party by two football players being recruited by the University of Colorado at Boulder. She does not want to testify, and no charges are filed. May 1997: Richard L. Byyny becomes chancellor of the Boulder campus. February 1998: Mary T. Keenan, a prosecutor in the Boulder County district attorney's office, meets with Mr. Byyny, university lawyers, and athletics officials about the 1997 incident and Colorado's recruiting practices. Ms. Keenan later says she put the university "on notice" about concerns dealing with sex and alcohol. January 1999: Gary Barnett becomes head football coach. September 2000: Elizabeth Hoffman becomes president of the University of Colorado System. December 2001: Colorado football players and recruits attend an off-campus party. Two female students later say they were sexually assaulted while drunk at the party, and a third female student says she was raped soon after leaving the party. April-May 2002: Prosecutors decline to file criminal charges of rape against the football players and recruits, but do charge four football players with providing alcohol to minors at the party. The university revokes the four athletes' scholarships. December 2002: Lisa Simpson, a university student, files a federal lawsuit charging that she was raped by football players and recruits during the 2001 party and accusing the university of fostering recruiting practices that harm women. Ms. Simpson later agrees to have her name used in news reports. December 2003: A second female student files a federal lawsuit charging that she was raped by athletes during the same party. January 2004: Monique Gillaspie, a former soccer player at the university, files a third federal lawsuit, charging that she was raped after the party. She, too, agrees to allow her name to be used in news reports. A deposition is released in which Ms. Keenan, now the county's district attorney, accuses the university of using sex and alcohol in recruiting athletes. Athletics officials deny the accusations. Colorado's governor, Bill Owens, a Republican, demands a public accounting from the university. February 2, 2004: Ms. Hoffman says the university's Board of Regents will appoint an independent commission to investigate the accusations. February 17-18: A former Colorado placekicker, Katie Hnida, tells Sports Illustrated that she was raped by a teammate in 2000. Mr. Barnett, the football coach, makes denigrating comments about Ms. Hnida, and Ms. Hoffman puts him on paid leave. February 18-19: Police release a report in which another woman said that she was sexually assaulted in 2001, and that the coach told her that he would back his player if she pursued charges. No charges are filed. Police also say they are investigating whether still another woman was raped by a Colorado football player, in 2002. February 27: The governor appoints the state's attorney general, Ken Salazar, as a special prosecutor to investigate the accusations. March 4: President Hoffman announces stringent new policies for athletics recruiting, including requirements that high-school students be accompanied by their parents or a coach throughout their recruiting visit to a campus, and comply with an 11 p.m. curfew. The university also will prohibit student hosts from spending unsupervised time with recruits. March 11: Ms. Hoffman is called to testify at a Congressional hearing on the Colorado scandal and on recruiting practices nationwide.
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
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