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Showing posts with label Mike Rice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Rice. Show all posts

Monday, April 22, 2013

The firing of the basketball coach at Rutgers University: Who controls the narrative?

By Larry Hirschhorn
Learning from Experience Blog
Originally published on April 12, 2013

This past week Rutgers University fired its basketball coach, Mike Rice, and pressured its athletic director to resign. For our European colleagues, Rutgers is the major public university in the state of New Jersey. An assistant basketball coach for the university’s basketball team, Erick Murdock, unhappy over what he described as his dismissal ten months ago, created video footage of Coach Rice hitting players during practice and calling them “faggots” and “homos.” ESPN got hold of the video, most likely from Murdock’s lawyer, and the university, upon learning that ESPN was about to file a report, released the video to the public. The video created a public relations scandal leading to Rice’s firing and the athletic director’s resignation. Some faculty members asked that the University's president, Robert Barchi, resign. Readers interested in seeing an extract from the video can go here.

The press focused on the video and the coach’s distasteful if not abusive behavior. But journalists paid little to attention to a report the university’s outside counsel wrote several months before the video’s release.  The report, conveys a much more nuanced picture of Rice’s behavior and its meaning. In the popular press Murdock was a whistle blower who was fired after he complained about the Coach’s abusive behavior. But nothing could be farther from the truth. This gap sheds important light on the challenges we face in situating information in its appropriate context. In fact, this case suggests that the "information revolution" strips information from its context.  This is why executives can no longer control the public narrative about the institutions they lead. Their leadership is jeopardized.

Let’s consider four features of the popular narrative about Coach Rice’s behavior. My goal is to not defend or condemn his behavior. Instead, I want to show that when we consider the context of a seemingly straightforward narrative, -- a whistle blowing hero brings down a villain-- its simplicity and evident standing as a morality tale is undermined. We have to ask, “What is real?”  Below, I introduce each section of my analysis by first  italicizing the feature of the narrative I propose to examine.

The entire blog post is here.

Thanks to Tom Fink for this story.