Nassar scandal rooted in MSU culture

Lin Washington ook up, not down, in the scandal buffeting Michigan State. If the school’s ongoing legal torment over disgraced gymnastics’ coach Larry Nassar is at all instructional, if there is anything useful to learn from its example, it’s that an organization gets into this kind of all-encompassing legal trouble not because of a single perpetrator but because of a pervasive attitude, an apathy or a blindness, at the very top.

This week, the entire Michigan State faculty called on the school’s eight-member Board of Trustees to resign, and it doesn’t seem an unreasonable demand. Federal authorities launched a fresh Title IX investigation into the school’s handling of Nassar’s molestations as well as other sexual assault cases involving the football and basketball teams this week.

That’s on top of inquiries by a Congressional committee and the Michigan attorney general, seeking to understand how a serial pedophile could have had a decadeslong tenure at the school’s sports medicine clinic, despite complaints of his conduct going back to 1997.

Merrily Dean Baker believes Nassar should have been stopped cold in ’97, the first time a Michigan State gymnast reported to a coach that Nassar had violated her. Baker, the school’s athletic director from 1992 to 1995, attributes that systemic failure to a culture that balked at Title IX compliance, and allowed employees to be ignorant or dismissive of the law’s requirements. Over the next few years, 14 university employees would receive complaints about Nassar, with no action.

“You didn’t have to be a hero,” Baker said. “All you had to do was your job, when a kid said, ‘I think I’ve been abused.’” A brief anatomy of one case: In 2014, Amanda Thomashow told school authorities that Nassar sexually abused her during a ‘treatment’ to the point that she had to push him and his erection off her. MSU’s Title IX inquiry consisted mainly of consulting four colleagues of Nassar’s, all of them school employees friendly to him. They neglected to check his work computer. After that dogged detective work, the school wrote two separate findings, one for her and one for him.

The Title IX conclusion given to Thomashow said, “We cannot find that the conduct was of a sexual nature” In other words, she lost the case.

But a separate finding for Nassar was longer, and contained a far more serious admission. Merrily Dean Baker

“We find that whether medically sound or not, the failure to adequately explain procedures such as these invasive, sensitive procedures, is opening the practice up to liability and is exposing patients to unnecessary trauma based on the possibility of perceived sexual misconduct.”

Michigan State withheld that finding from Thomashow, a flat illegality. Worse, it never shared it with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which was looking into how the school handled other sexual assault complaints.

Now to the why. Why would a large and respected state institution behave this way? Because of a protect-the-brand-at-all-costs philosophy, perhaps, that dated to Baker’s tenure.

“It’s pretty traceable, and pretty discouraging,” she said.

Baker was hired to bring the school up to date on Title IX standards by former school president John DiBiaggio who was seeking to reform athletics and displace George Perles as a too-powerful figure who held the dual titles of football coach and athletic director. But Baker said she was resisted by the school’s power brokers from her first day on the job.

“The board and Perles commenced what amounted to a very public assault on Merrily’s work and vision as AD,” says Steve Klein, former sports editor of the Lansing State Journal, who is now a professor-emeritus of journalism at George Mason University. Klein recalls Perles angrily telling him that hewouldneverworkforawoman. Baker was ultimately forced out after three years of constant battles.

Men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo, speaking to reporters on the eve of the Big Ten tournament, maintains he always has cooperated properly with authorities and wants to do “whatever it takes to heal,” as does football coach Mark Dantonio. But to state the obvious, the problem is much bigger — and higher up — than coaches. Until Michigan State wipes the board clean, it’s hard to see how the school can begin to recover.

“I thought this group was going out when I was 30,” Baker said. “I’m now 75. And they’re still here.”