By Maria Trovato
During his State of the Campus Address at the University Senate meeting Tuesday, University of Maryland President Wallace Loh said he did the right thing by accepting responsibility for Jordan McNair’s death and will work with advisors to change the culture on the football team
“It was the right thing to do because a young man died,” Loh said. “He should not have died, but because of our mistakes, he did die.”
Loh made a public statement on Aug. 4 accepting moral and legal responsibility for McNair’s death four days after ESPN published an article about the toxic culture of the UMD football team. During his address Tuesday, Loh only mentioned an article describing the toxic culture published after he had accepted responsibility.
After a commission concluded there was not a toxic culture on the football team, The Board of Regents recommended Loh not fire DJ Durkin. However, Loh said he knew the community would not be satisfied with that outcome.
“I have a pretty good sense of the pulse of this campus,” Loh said. “All hell [would] break loose.”
Loh said UMD will work with advisors to learn how to change the culture on the football team. He also said UMD has already implemented half of the suggestions made by the sports medicine group and will hire an external group to oversee the rest of the implementation.
“We can have a program that puts the well-being and the health of students first and foremost and also [is] a successful program,” the president said.
Loh also explained his decision to retire. He said he made this decision after receiving advice from his wife on the way to the press conference where he announced his retirement.
“She said ‘you can always get another job, but you can never get back your integrity,’” he said.
Still, some UMD community members are not satisfied with Loh’s response to the scandal. Thomas Cohen is a physics professor and faculty senator who attended the meeting. He said he finds Loh responsible for the current crisis within UMD’s athletic department.
“He emphasized football far more than anything else,” Cohen said. “It’s not surprising that a culture that might have fallen short of some people’s definition of toxic but was certainly completely noxious developed on campus. He should have resigned as soon as the allegations came forward and it became clear that there was abuse of football players. Had he any character, he would have.”
Loh’s address Tuesday signaled the end of a semester rife with scandal and controversy. Loh will serve as president of the university for one more semester before he retires in the spring.