The NU hazing scandal: How far up and down the ladder should it go?

& the cereal championship round

July 13, 2023, Issue No. 96

This week

• If Fitzgerald has to go, so does most of his staff

• Last week’s winning tweets

• Follow-up on the launch of the Threads app

• News and Views — on Brandon Johnson’s blueprint for the future and more

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the News — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• The great Cheerios face-off

• Word Court — is “guys” a gendered term?

• Mary Schmich — draws a bird

• “The Mincing Rascals” preview

• Re:Tweets — Featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists

• Tune of the Week — “Dream Operator” by the Talking Heads

If Fitzgerald has to go, so does most of his staff

Numerous media reports this week about the firing of head Northwestern University football coach Pat Fitzgerald said that the school plans to retain every other member of its football coaching staff and to appoint journeyman defensive coordinator David Braun as interim head coach.

Braun was hired away from North Dakota State University in January and so likely was unaware of the alleged hazing rituals at Northwestern that prompted Fitzgerald’s ouster.

Fitzgerald, who had coached the Wildcats for 17 years, has said he was also unaware of the alleged hazing, and an internal investigation found no proof that he was aware of it. But he had to go because of the accountability theory — he should have known and should have put a stop to it.

But based on that theory, his underlings on the coaching staff — position and other specialty coaches who are usually in much closer contact with individual players — also should have known and should have either told Fitzgerald or made sure the hazing stopped. Anyone who knew and said or did nothing to stop it was derelict in his duty and ought to lose his job.

I also have questions about the competency of the athletic director and university president. President Michael Schill first handed down a mild punishment for Fitzgerald — a two-week suspension without pay during the offseason — based on the results of a lengthy outside investigation. But a quick bit of diligent follow-up reporting by the student journalists at The Daily Northwestern revealed specific hazing allegations that caused the whipsawed Schill to increase the punishment from a short suspension to a termination.

WGN-AM 720 host John Williams asked during the Wednesday afternoon recording of this week’s “Mincing Rascals” podcast whether it would have been necessary for Schill to fire Fitzgerald if Schill had initially understood the gravity of the hazing allegations and suspended the coach for a few months or even the entire season.

A good question.

I’ve never met Fitzgerald, but my overall impression over the last 17 years of following local sports news is that he’s not a wicked or incompetent man. Old school rah-rah, to be sure, but not malign or cruel. He evidently didn’t make it clear or clear enough to his players that even jocular abuse of teammates is no longer acceptable;,that it can be traumatic and doesn’t build team spirit as once was widely thought.

A lengthy punishment accompanied by full disclosure right out of the gate last week might have been sufficient.

I’d like to think that football coaches throughout America are now administering or doubling down on anti-hazing admonitions if for no other reason than their careers depend on putting a stop to it. But since this is hardly the first major hazing scandal and so many people still think that dry-humping and other forms of ritual abuse are just high jinks and shenanigans, my guess is that football coaches throughout America are now nervously hoping that disaffected players they have coached aren’t even now preparing to blow the whistle on them.

It would be spectacularly naive to imagine this problem is unique to Northwestern, in other words.

Meanwhile, a wag of my finger at those in Evanston who are exploiting this controversy by using it as ammunition against the proposed dramatic renovation of Ryan Field, Northwestern’s football stadium. I don’t have a position on the project, but it is designed to outlast any one coach or athletic director or school president and ought to be judged on its merits, not buried by opportunists taking advantage of the pain and humiliation of young athletes.

Last week’s winning tweet

When the inventor of the USB stick dies they’ll gently lower the coffin, then pull it back up, turn it the other way, then lower it again. — @Cluedont

For last week’s poll, since I was otherwise away from my desk with limited Wi-Fi, I resurrected a group of top tweets from 2014 for your consideration. I will do so again this week for reasons I’ll explain below.

Meanwhile, there was also a special bonus poll featuring only tweets deploying the f-word in what I thought were amusing ways. The winner:

My visitors cancelled on me at the last minute, so here I am with a clean house like a fucking idiot. — @Anniewritess

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

Thread count

At the end of my Tuesday item “Threads has not sewn me up as a user,” I polled readership to ask for their current stance on Threads, the week-old Twitter-like social platform from Meta — the company that owns Facebook and Instagram.

Threads gained more than 100 million users in its first five days, reportedly a record, and is the first platform that appears to be a serious threat to take the place of Twitter in the micro-blogging space. My view is that it was launched before it was truly ready, and I listed my top four problems with it.

Some 55% of my readership voted “not into that kind of social media.”

But of the remaining 45% — those who are at least Twitter /Threads-curious — 53% said they’ve adopted a wait-and-see attitude about Threads, 42% said they’re giving Threads a try, and 4% reported that they’ve already converted to Threads and have said goodbye to Twitter and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk.

I found this conversation at the Columbia Journalism Review to be interesting.

News & Views

News: Mayor Brandon Johnson’s transition plan calls for lowering the default citywide speed limit to 20 mph, and 10 mph on residential streets.

View: That’s insane. The goal outlined in Johnson’s plan to “promote and support greater connectivity by active and sustainable options such as walking, public transit, biking and other methods that do not require car ownership,” is creditable, but implementing those kinds of limits — along with enforcement fines, one would have to assume — would cause citizens to march on City Hall with torches and pitchforks.

“Building Bridges and Growing the Soul of Chicago: A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All” is a generally utopian document. From the Sun-Times:

(The report) is loaded with ambitious and politically explosive ideas, including creating a public bank to spark development in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods; creating an Office of Freedom Bureau to handle reparations; pressing vacant and neglected buildings into service for crime victims; creating a guaranteed college fund for babies born in Chicago and mandating municipal snow removal on Chicago sidewalks. …

Shuttered mental health clinics should be reopened and offer expanded access to trauma and mental health care, and “24-hour walk-in service” should be offered at the city’s three remaining mental health clinics until that happens, according to the report … (which also calls for) offering housing incentives to lure graduates of historically Black colleges and universities to start their careers in Chicago … and enhancing CTA service outside rush hour to make the system more useful throughout the day, particularly for overnight shift workers. …

It suggests using the Boston model to develop housing for unhoused students; creating a permanent youth commission; offering vocational trades at all schools as early as middle-school; bolstering certificate offerings; and giving “full scholarships to local universities to CPS grads seeking to become teachers.”

Not a word in 223 pages about how Johnson intends to find the revenue to pay for these generally noble dreams. Which underscores one of my main reservations about our new mayor — that he’s an activist at heart, not a municipal executive, and so has a tendency to promise far more than he can deliver.

He is at the point where most new mayors say something like, “I have just taken an in-depth look at the numbers and consulted with my budget director, and I fear we are facing more difficult choices than I previously thought.” Instead he’s like, “The city is going to shovel your sidewalks in the winter!”

News: Iowa Republicans pass a new 6-week abortion ban

View: I’m philosophically in favor of abortion rights, as are 61% of Iowa adults recently polled by the Des Moines Register. Meanwhile, “Women in states with abortion bans are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth, according to a report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute,” per Axios.

I therefore would be surprised if these sorts of laws help the Republican Party or attract business to the states that enact them. If I were fresh out of college, I’d be very reluctant to move to Iowa or to Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

News: A not-for-profit is buying nearly two dozen newspapers in Maine.

View: We’re going to see more and more of this as print journalism struggles financially:

The National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that was started in 2021, will buy the papers from Masthead Maine, a private company that owns most of the independent media outlets in the state, including five of its six daily papers. … The National Trust for Local News, based in Denver, was started with a goal of preserving local news outlets by helping them find ways to become sustainable. The organization owns 24 local newspapers in Colorado through a collaboration with The Colorado Sun.

Land of Linkin’

• In the Daily Bee: Dutch artist Ard Gelinck has used digital image manipulation to pair recent images of celebrities with images of them when they were much younger. Some, like Meryl Streep and Oprah Winfrey, have barely changed. Others …

  

• In “The Case Against Travel,” the New Yorker’s Agnes Callard offers the hot take that “travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. … When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? … Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue.”

• The nomination of Hulu’s “The Bear” in the Emmys’ comedy category had people reposting this 2017 “Saturday Night Live” short:

• Former local journalist Paul Dailing is reviving his Chicago Corruption Walking Tour after a four-year hiatus. He writes, “The tour takes participants to sites of vote-buying, kickback schemes, sweetheart deals, tax-increment financing chicanery, districts gerrymandered down to single blocks and other political misdeeds.” There are two-hour tours for $20 and three-hour tours for $30 on the weekends of July 22-23 and August 5-6. See a WTTW-Ch. 11 feature on the tour here and buy tickets here.

• On August 1, there will be a foreclosure auction on the Highland Park home of Robert Crimo Jr., whose son Robert E. Crimo III is charged in the July 4, 2022, parade massacre in that city. The father is also charged with seven counts of reckless conduct for facilitating his son’s purchase of the firearm allegedly used in the shootings.

• The Journal-Times in Racine: “Racine couple, Milwaukee filmmaker team release documentary about old-time music, a genre of folk music.” The movie, “The Merry Love the Fiddle, The Merry Love to Dance,” features legendary fiddler Lynn “Chirps” Smith, formerly of the Chicago area. Watch the trailer here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Squaring up the news

A bonus addendum to the Land of Linkin’: Here, from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson, is a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing, Chicago Public Square.

■ An explanation that many accounts of Northwestern University’s football hazing scandal omitted: The definition of “dry humping.”

■ Poynter news media watchdog Tom Jones’ acclaim for Northwestern student journalists’ coverage of the scandal: “Some of the best reporting anywhere over the weekend.”

■ Popular Information’s rundown of the corporations supporting Alabama Sen. —and former Auburn football coach — Tommy Tuberville, who’s been tying himself in knots to defend white nationalists.

■ Investigate Midwest: Y’know the cliché about Midwest states being climate havens? Yeah, forget that.

■ Slow Boring columnist Matthew Yglesias: “What I got wrong about COVID.”

■ Esquire’s Charlie Pierce: “California Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided to … go bare-knuckles with Florida Meathead-In-Chief Ronald DeSantis’ … clever-dick strategy of flying migrants all over the landscape without their knowledge.”

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Two bowls of cereal enter the arena. Only one will emerge victorious

In the June 29 edition, I asked readers to take a click survey to rank their favorites among the top 10 bestselling cereals. Several readers complained that some favorites and old standards weren’t on the list. So I created two more surveys, one that pitted less-sweet cereals against one another, the other that matched up sweeter cereals, and from those results I was able to glean the top four in each category:

Sweeter: Honey Nut Cheerios, Honey Bunches of Oats, Frosted Flakes and Granola.

Less Sweet: Cheerios, Raisin Bran, Chex (all varieties) and Special K.

The results of each survey are in, and now it’s an all-Cheerios final.

Word court: Is ‘guys’ a gendered term?

Although the word “guys” carried a strong sense of male identity in the days of “Guys and Dolls” (1955), common usage of “guys” by men and women to refer to mixed groups or even all-female groups has removed much of its former gender connotations.

“OK, guys, let’s go” addresses everyone equally in most contexts. Or does it?

Joe Pinsker addressed this issue in The Atlantic in 2018:

“Guys” is an easygoing way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion—a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves "guys." …

Perhaps the most passionate opponent of the word is Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In a 2002 essay in the journal Qualitative Sociology, she wrote about the problem with male-default terms such as “chairman,” “congressman,” and “mankind.” Kleinman saw them together as “another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which ‘man’ in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women.” She reserved a special disapproval for “you guys,” which she considered the “most insidious” of these phrases. …

The alternatives to guys tend to have downsides of their own. “Folks”—inclusive and warm, but a little affected and forced. “Friends”—fine in social contexts, strange at work. “People”—too often pushy and impersonal. … “Y’all” … seems to be the alternative with the most passionate backers. It has many of the necessary features to be the heir to guys—inviting, inclusive, monosyllabic. But what holds it back is its informality, as well as its regional associations, which many don’t know how to handle.

Your verdict?

Bird drawing by Mary Schmich

Mary Schmich: How to draw a bird

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is her most recent offering:

I'm on the tail end of COVID, meaning I could go to, say, the grocery store, with a mask. But I'm still on semi-lockdown and finding ways to entertain myself.

Yesterday I scrubbed the baseboards in the stairwell of my building, just not to go stir crazy. Today, inspired by instructions in The New York Times, I drew this bird.

Here is the link, but if you don't have a Times subscription and are eager to draw a bird — as we all should be! — here's how. It's really fun and easy! All you need is a pencil.

From The New York Times:

1. Draw a rough circle in the top right quadrant of a square sheet of paper; this will become the bird’s head. Next to it, starting at 7 o’clock, add an oval twice the size for the body.

2. On the right side of the circle, draw a small triangle for the beak. To the oval, add two long, thin shapes for the wing and tail.

3. Smooth around the shapes to outline the bird. For an eye, add a circle just above the beak. Section off a portion of the head for the black cap and a triangular patch for the throat. Add lines for feathers on the wing and tail.

4. Draw a leg emerging from the abdomen at about a 30-degree angle. Add toes and a claw, then two vertical lines for a perch between them. Shade the perch.

5. Erase any unnecessary guidelines from the shapes you drew in previous steps.

6. Use black to color in the eye, cap, beak and throat. Use gray to color in the wing, tail and legs and to shade the abdomen.

Then congratulate yourself! — Mary Schmich

Minced Words

Austin Berg is back from his honeymoon and has much to say about Patrick Fitzgerald, the Threads app, 12-week paid maternity leaves and quality TV. I joined him along with Brandon Pope and host John Williams for this week’s episode of The Mincing Rascals. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

“Uncle Duke” is a frequent finalist in both tweet polls. To learn more about him, read my recent entry, “Meet ‘Uncle Duke. ’”

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week again come from a selection of the best tweets I curated in 2014. The reason is that I’m finding fewer and fewer worthy offerings on Twitter in this era when so many users have left the platform or simply aren’t tweeting much anymore (six of the finalists below, for instance). I’m hoping to build up a backlog of worthy current entries but am prepared to cut back to five offerings a week instead of 10 if this trend continues.

• I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve walked down the street and women have told me to smile. Oh, yes I can. It’s zero. — @ScottSimpson

• If buying new underwear is evidence of an affair, my husband has been faithful for at least nine years. — @nerdreign

• Since my mother passed two years ago, my dental hygienist has filled the role of Person Disappointed in Everything I Do. — @mathowie

• Think your biggest fear is being buried alive? Nope, it’s being buried alive with Flo from Progressive. — @BadBanana

• You’re a lucky man” is a great way to tell someone, “I’d like to have sex with your wife. — @DamienFahey

• I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10. I don’t want you to guess, I just thought you should know. — @bridger_w

• My ex has had a really hard time moving on. From what I can tell through his blinds, he is currently eating (something we always did). — @MindyFurano

• Divorces should just be reverse weddings where you get pushed out of a church while your friends steal appliances from your home. — @yuckybot

• It’s good they call it the Statue of Liberty so, right off the bat, you know it’s a statue and not a giant or something. — @BadBanana

• “W.A.D.” — a simple mnemonic device for remembering the steps in folding a fitted sheet — stands for: 1. Wad it up; 2. And; 3. Done. — @MatthewBaldwin

Vote here and check the current results in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

I love the lilt and melody of “Dream Operator,” a 1986 song in waltz time by the Talking Heads. I’ve read several opinions about its deeper meaning (if any; with David Byrne you can never be sure how much he’s just messing with you), but my take has long been that its eerie message is that all of life, all of existence as you know it, is simply your personal dream:

You dreamed it all
And this is your story
Do you know who you are?
You're the dream operator

Other, more mundane interpretations have the song as Byrne’s exhortation that we are responsible for fulfilling our dreams, or that Byrne is singing in the voice of God to a dying person.

I’m really curious what readers think.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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