If Northwestern winds up in the market for a new President, they’ll have to deal with Stanford and Texas A&M also looking for new leadership.
The Stanford President resigned earlier this week over a question regarding some of his research. The President of Texas A&M announced her resignation today due to fallout over a controversial hiring move.
At least those two (Stanford and A&M) recognized their situations and offered their resignations.
I’m not privy to Schill’s conversations with the board, but if I were his attorney or the headhunter that helped him land this position, I would have advised him to take full public responsibility for the public relations fumble (specifically avoiding taking any responsibility for the hazing itself) and offer his resignation to the board.
That way if the board asked him to stay on and work through this, he has forced them to provide him the vote of confidence that he in fact wasn’t involved in this scandal and as a result can be trusted to clean it up.
If not and they accept his resignation, he has avoided getting fired at some future date because he wasn’t able to better manage a situation that is quickly becoming unmanageable. He’ll still be the fall guy for the failure to execute a coverup, but by the time that this is all done, people won’t be talking about that.
They way it is playing out now, this is death by a thousand cuts. All of the information will eventually come out and he will have to answer the terrible question of what he knew and when. And any claims that he was unaware of the depth of the corruption in the athletic department will only elicit the same response we’ve seen to a similar claim from Fitz. Even if you didn’t know, you should have known.
Jeff
With all the close scrutiny the stress today for college presidents must be huge. The only other time it was this severe probably was during the 1960’s student protests when several were technically held hostage and some resigned . Of course the salaries, benefits, and prestige today are large as well
I think Schill is on the hot seat ( and would be let go) if it’s determined through settlement or judgement with Fitz’ firing, that his 2 week to outright termination decision cost NU a lot more money than simply an outright termination. ( Dan Webb is using that as a big factor the case)
Harry