(10-17-2019 05:12 PM)burden Wrote: (10-16-2019 10:33 PM)cschierh Wrote: (10-16-2019 08:12 PM)AlphaFlash Wrote: Here's some drama for your Thursday. I really don't know what to think.
https://www.change.org/p/kent-state-pres...c-director
For others late to this, there' been a lot of talk about the petition and the things leading up to it on this board, most recently in the "Future Football Schedule" thread.
The Kent Stater/KentWired had a solid story this week, quoting a lot of the people involved (though not Nielsen). President Diacon is quoted but didn't say much except "we're studying it." Link is.
http://www.kentwired.com/latest_updates/...92fdc.html
I saw online stories from Crain's Cleveland Business (a good news operation) and one of the Cleveland TV stations today. First stories I've seen outside the Stater. Nothing from Beacon or Record-Courier or PD.
I've consistently heard there has been higher-level pressure against publication at the Beacon and R-C. (Most of that was before the petition went public. It should be even harder to ignore now. I'm a retired journalism professor, and I'm really disappointed in those papers. In all my time in the newspaper business, I never saw a well-researched story spiked like this.)
Going public has given this thing some legs.
The beacon had an article in the Thursday paper. It’s funny how something as dumb as canceling a field hockey game caused this to go public. There were employees using master keys to harass people and employees gawking at the gymnastics team and nothing much happened.
Hi Burden,
It is kind of crazy, isn't it?
I think a big reason for nothing happening is that, as the climate study demonstrated, people were afraid to report wrongdoing for fear of retaliation.
One of my biggest regrets was not doing more when I was there. I was afraid of losing my job, especially as I was closing in on completing my master's degree. I'm not proud of my silence as I watched things get worse and worse.
Getting out of athletics entirely is part of why I felt safe coming forward a little over a year ago. I provided pages and pages of documents to the Akron Beacon Journal and Record Courier (two newspapers now in the same chain) in August of 2018. Reporters interviewed key witnesses, reviewed all of the documents, made more public records requests, and wrote a series of articles. Those stories were killed by the ABJ's editor in what I suspect, based on my own experience as a reporter, was part of a coverup.
I disagree, however, that the field hockey incident was silly. It showed once again just how dysfunctional the department is under Joel's "leadership," whether anyone thinks his handling of the situation was insensitive or not. Carelessness and lack of planning and due diligence have been staples of Nielsen's tenure.
Unfortunately, Nielsen has always been a teflon don, as staff and donors have come to call him. There is a layer of KSU administrators suffering from willful blindness.
As former KSU general Counsel Jim Watson commented on our blog yesterday, "Nielsen will never be removed so long as the upper administration continues their love-affair with Nielsen. They work hard to cover up his screw ups and place the blame on others. I get the feeling the new president is an honorable man. After that, not so much."