Columnist Jim Slusher: What would have happened at Northwestern without those news reports?

By Jim Slusher

jslusher@dailyherald.com

It is indisputable that publicity complicates leaders' decision making, but that doesn't have to mean it leads to bad decisions.

I have wrestled with this reflection as I watched the Northwestern hazing reports burst into a white-hot scandal, then, almost as quickly, reduce to the steady simmer that Coach Pat Fitzgerald's firing seems to have brought it to for the moment.

Publicity clearly played a role in Fitzgerald's case. University President Michael Schill acknowledged as much in his announcement Monday that "new media reporting today" - that is, reporting following the official independent investigative report Schill had previously seen - confirmed hazing at the program "was systemic dating back many years."

Without that reporting, mostly by Northwestern student journalists or based on their work, Fitzgerald might even now be sitting out the remaining week and a half of the original two-week sentence Schill handed him. With it, Northwestern's legendary coach was handed his walking papers in a matter of hours.

Fitzgerald supporters likely question whether it was really his behavior that led to his ignominious departure or the negative publicity his story was generating. At least one group, in an anonymous social media post claiming to represent the "ENTIRE" team - their caps - said the complaints against him were "exaggerated and twisted into lies." An ESPN report on Fitzgerald's firing quoted a current player saying "none of that stuff happened in our locker room" and blaming a whistleblower whose "sole goal was to see Coach Fitz rot in jail."

So, it seems obvious that there is more to this story than we've gotten so far, and perhaps as time progresses, we'll get it. But does lacking it mean Fitzgerald got a raw deal because of a couple of negative news stories?

I'm inclined to think the opposite - that whatever the complete picture of the Northwestern football program is, we would never get it without those stories. Unquestionably, something eyebrow raising has been going on. Because Northwestern is a private institution and can keep the investigative report confidential, we have only Schill's brief summary, it coming only after the Daily Northwestern's revelations, to provide a glimpse of what it was.

From the beginning, this story has been as much about managing publicity as it has been about managing the situation. Schill's original announcement of the two-week suspension came late on a Friday afternoon, timing well known in our business meant to give a news story a quick and hopefully unnoticed death. The investigative report has been kept out of public view. The astonishingly swift turnaround from two-week suspension to loss of job and reputation aimed to navigate a tidal wave of sudden reporting nationwide.

So can it really be argued that publicity led to a "bad decision" or a "hasty decision" in Fitzgerald's case? No, it seems to me that 17 years of lack of publicity may have had more to do with what happened, and it's lack of publicity that keeps us from having a fuller, more nuanced view now. Under those circumstances, it seems the two days of reporting by the Daily Northwestern opened the door to further analysis and improvements, suggesting that while the university might not be so proud of its football program at the moment, it has reason to dote at least a bit on its journalism training.

jslusher@dailyherald.com