Northwestern will reconsider penalties for coach Pat Fitzgerald after new details emerged Saturday surrounding allegations of hazing in the football program.
University president Michael Schill, in a letter sent late Saturday to the Northwestern community, wrote that he "may have erred in weighing the appropriate sanction" for Fitzgerald, who began serving a two-week unpaid suspension Friday. Fitzgerald's suspension was among the measures Northwestern announced after concluding the six-month investigation it commissioned into hazing allegations made by an anonymous whistleblower.
Schill will speak with Northwestern's board of trustees and other university leaders to determine a new penalty for Fitzgerald, the team's coach since 2006 and a two-time national defensive player of the year for the Wildcats.
"In determining an appropriate penalty for the head coach, I focused too much on what the report concluded he didn't know and not enough on what he should have known," Schill wrote. "As the head coach of one of our athletics programs, coach Fitzgerald is not only responsible for what happens within the program but also must take great care to uphold our institutional commitment to the student experience.
Clearly, he failed to uphold that commitment, and I failed to sufficiently consider that failure in levying a sanction.”
Wow that’s truly awful. They beat around the bush a lot in this article but it sure sounds like the “hazing” they’re describing is regular gang rape in the locker room.