Rutgers' problems won't go away

Having taken an already terrible situation and somehow made it worse, Rutgers University seems intent on drawing the blinds now and waiting until the furor over the hiring of new athletic director Julie Hermann goes away.

Unfortunately for Rutgers, the fresh problems it has created for itself, and for Hermann, aren't going anywhere. It may take a while for the effects of the flawed hiring process to become apparent, but those are inevitable.

A series of meetings scheduled for this week between Hermann and some athletic department coaches and administrators has been postponed, according to one report. Maybe there are second thoughts, after all, but considering how Rutgers handled the hire, those would qualify as first thoughts.

To review, last week was another bad one for the Scarlet-Faced Knights. Hermann, named to succeed Tim Pernetti, who was swept out as the scapegoat for the university's inaction regarding abusive basketball coach Mike Rice, was found to have a few problems with her resumé, too.

Despite having undertaken what school president Robert Barchi called a search that was "deliberative at every stage of this process," the search committee either hadn't uncovered or wasn't concerned about the two lawsuits in which Hermann was named as a defendant as an administrator or the accusation that, when she coached volleyball at Tennessee, Hermann was labeled by the 1996 team as being abusive herself.

Members of the 26-person search committee describe a process in which the leading candidate was identified quickly by cochair Kate Sweeney and the hiring recommendation was rushed to Barchi's desk, without much deliberation or input from the full committee. Part of the hurry was to finish work before cochair Richard Edwards left for a trip to China. And part of it, apparently, according to committee sources who couldn't wait to give their side to the Newark Star-Ledger, Bergen Record, and ESPN, was because Sweeney had made up her mind Hermann would be the next athletic director.

Now, that's a hiring process.

The bare bones of the problems Hermann had in the past aren't pretty. That 1996 Tennessee volleyball team said Hermann called them "whores, alcoholics and learning-disabled," and 15 members of the team signed a publicly released letter attesting to their version of the facts. A jury awarded the group a $150,000 settlement. Hermann eventually resigned as coach and went into the athletic department administration.

Also at Tennessee, Hermann was named in a lawsuit filed by an assistant coach who claimed she was fired for becoming pregnant. At Louisville, where Hermann was hired as a senior athletic administrator, another lawsuit was filed, this one by a female assistant track and field coach who took complaints of abusive behavior by the head coach to Hermann and then to the school's human resources department. She was fired three weeks later, and said that Hermann told her going to HR was a mistake.

Again, not pretty. None of us, however, knows the exact flesh of facts that surrounded those bare bones of a story. Hermann, who admits to being hard-driving and demanding, certainly rubbed some people the wrong way. Some of them lost games, some of them lost jobs. More than a few of them tried to get back at her. Whether she was a good administrator trying to deal with crazy situations or a bad one who was the cause of those situations is unknowable from the outside. Everyone involved has a different version of the facts.

One thing is certainly, undeniably true: The full Rutgers search committee should have known everything. In fact, it knew almost nothing.

"Everything in that letter is true," Erin Zammett Ruddy, one of the former volleyball players, said in a blog post. "But I agree with what many are saying. This reflects worse on Rutgers than it does on Julie."

There is a gender issue at play here, too, and it is a tricky one to parse. Being a female administrator in what is essentially a male world is incredibly difficult. If she keeps the job she is scheduled to begin June 17, Hermann will be one of only three female athletic directors at a major college or university.

In trying to move away from the Rice-Pernetti fiasco, it might have seemed emblematic of a fresh start for the school to hire a female athletic director. Sweeney apparently thought so. Hermann wasn't on the list of 47 individuals identified by a headhunter firm hired to cull a list of prospective candidates, according to the Star-Ledger. (How many of those 47 are women is not known.) Sweeney contacted the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators to get some more names, and Hermann's was on that list. She quickly rose to the top of all the lists.

That is fine as far as it goes, but now Hermann has to deal with what the university's handling of the hiring has left her. In a position that requires a powerful base, particularly for a woman, she has no power. She can't lead decisively, because she won't be able to force those under her to follow.

Every coach, assistant coach, trainer, and administrator in the athletic department knows that if there is a problem with Hermann - job security, salary, funding for a sport, whatever - all it will take is the threat of a trip to the human resources department and a phone call to the newspaper to get that problem solved.

Rutgers peeks through the drawn blinds and waits now. Perhaps the postponement of the meetings this week is an indication of something, but Barchi previously said he stands behind Hermann. Of course, he said that about Pernetti at one time, too.

Whether Hermann fails now or later is merely a matter of the timing. Rutgers has bungled another chance to get this thing right. Soon enough, though, the school will get one more try.