At some point in the early hours of Wednesday morning, as we pushed to the end of a hectic night at the Cardinal, I sat down and opened an e-mail from my mom with the subject line “I assume you’ve seen this.”
It was a link to a National Public Radio story that began, “First came sexual-assault allegations against Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State. Then, molestation accusations against Bernie Fine, an assistant basketball coach at Syracuse. And now, new details about what led John Chadima, an associate athletic director at Wisconsin, to resign earlier this month.”
Twenty-four days after a drunk John Chadima allegedly forced his hands down a student employees pants and threatened to fire the student if he reported it, 18 days after Chadima was placed on administrative leave and resigned from his position, and a few hours after the university released its report on the incident, there it was. Wisconsin had become the next stop on the shameful tour of sexual assault scandals in college athletics, the latest program to be bunched in with Penn State and Syracuse on the nation’s roll of imfamy.
But amid all of the shock and anger at someone like Chadima, who abused his power as a senior athletic department official to threaten his victims, Wisconsin students, fans and college sports observers in general should be relieved to see how the program has handled the allegations against Chadima.
There was no years-long cover-up, nor has anyone tried to discredit the allegations against Chadima, regrettable decisions we saw at Penn State and Syracuse. Instead, when that student reported the alleged assault, it was dealt with in a timely and professional manner that emphasized getting to the bottom of what happened.
Of course, the athletic department will have to answer for why it allowed Chadima to host parties and drink with students, some of whom were under 21, for years. But while this doesn’t excuse it, giving booze to underage college students—when not connected to sexual assault, as it should be obvious—is not likely to raise too many eyebrows.
I don’t praise the Wisconsin Athletic Department out of blind student loyalty, either. There have been times when the program has wrongly sought privacy over transparency in handling scandals, and perhaps when faced with wrongdoing by an even more prominent figure the university could fail itself and its fans. And, of course, there could be another shoe waiting to drop if this report leads more students to come forward and say they were assaulted by Chadima or anyone else.
But from where we stand today, the athletic department and univeristy handled the allegations in an honorable and refresing way. Wisconsin acted the way we would hope our institutions would act.
Not long after the Penn State scandal began to subside last fall, I wrote about how something similar could happen at Wisconsin, or anywhere. The programs in State College and Madison aren’t all that different as institutions—they have brands to protect and public reaction to worry about, meaning they have the same incentives to cover up scandals rather than be transparent and forthright about them.
Those incentives are still there, as is the reality that (no matter how much people like to pretend otherwise) this school and program we love is more than capable of being flawed and corrupt. That didn’t disappear overnight because Wisconsin did the right thing this time.
But this week, as we recoil at what John Chadima allegedly did in a hotel room a few weeks ago and praise his victim for finding the courage to report the crime, we should recognize the university for its actions. We should thank the people in whom we invest our trust for showing they are worthy of it.
How could Wisconsin better handle the John Chadima scandal? E-mail Nico at nicosavidge@gmail.com.
