With swim coach case, UK followed an old playbook of settlements, silence | Opinion
A few weeks ago, Dianne Fleet, the chair of Lexington-Fayette Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Coalition wrote an opinion piece about Lars Jorgensen, the former University of Kentucky swim coach now accused in a federal lawsuit of sexually harassing and abusing swimmers on his team.
As reporter John Cheves has documented, UK was warned numerous times about Jorgensen, and even suspended him for failing to report allegations of sexual harassment by one of his staff. He was also suspended for breaking NCAA rules on pushing students too hard in training.
Then UK paid Jorgensen $75,000 and sent him on his way in a settlement agreement that made no mention of past investigations.
“How can this be?” Fleet asked.
It’s a good question, but when it comes to UK, the answer is out of the same old playbook.
As befitting the corporate behemoth it is now, UK’s only instinct is to protect the brand.
Remember James Harwood? He’s the professor UK investigated for a relationship with a student. They wanted to get rid of him quickly, so they let him resign with several months pay and a promise not to disclose the investigations unless asked in an open records request. (The subsequent open records request from the UK student newspaper led to a six-year battle that UK eventually lost.)
Christopher Romanek was investigated by UK’s Title IX office in 2013 for having a relationship with a student whom he treated negatively after she ended the relationship, investigators found. He denied the allegations, but resigned with a settlement that made no mention of the investigations.
He also got two months salary and a $25,000 lump sum. He got another job at Furman University.
A year before that, Title IX investigators recommended that Anthony Wolbarst step down from teaching for inappropriate comments and retaliation against the person who reported them. Instead of going through a hearing, he resigned and got half his salary, vacation and full retirement benefits. The settlement did not mention any investigations.
UK did the same thing with Eric Smart. He’s the researcher who was put on probation for a year for sexual harassment in 2012, but he didn’t leave until he was investigated for falsifying research information.
UK didn’t put information about either investigation into his personnel file, so he moved on to teach at Bourbon County High School, where numerous students and fellow teachers accused him of harassment and discrimination.
Most employers only run criminal background checks, so these kinds of investigations might never show up during a new job search. UK”s defense has been that it’s better to get rid of these professors quickly than go through the long firing process for faculty.
But that does nothing for victims at UK or potential victims in other places where they might be hired with clean records.
The first time another swim coach warned UK about Lars Jorgensen came in 2012. Coach Mark Howard emailed then-head UK Coach Gary Connelly and AD Mitch Barnhart about what he called Jorgensen’s predatory behavior.
“I wish you the best and hope he does not bring down your University. This is no joke at all and I cannot stomach the fact that he will be coaching women again,” Howard wrote.
Connelly responded to Howard once, but nothing ever happened.
Now the lawyers and crisis communications teams are in place, and it’s clear we will only get the full story after reams of open records requests are fulfilled. (In one behavioral change, UK has not, so far, denied Cheves any open records requests. This is a welcome change, and one that should continue.)
Barnhart is known for keeping UK clean of the kind of athletics scandals that used to occur regularly at UK. Why didn’t he look into Howard’s warning when it came? Why did athletics ignore longtime Title IX compliance officer Sandy Bell when she said in an interview there is “a lot of smoke around this program.”
Even a highly ranked swimming program doesn’t hold that much value to Big Blue Nation, so why would Barnhart and company have risked glossing over problems it was plain to see could start cascading into the kind of horrific charges documented in the lawsuit?
The buck stops with Barnhart, who has a lot of questions to answer. Too bad so many of them will now have to come out in depositions. UK’s brand is high level athletics, but not at the cost of keeping students safe.
