Wallace Loh Should be Your University's Next President if There is an Opening

He has made mistakes; people at the top of the leadership pyramid frequently do. 


But when it came to investigating the death of Eric McNair this summer at a pre-season football practice, University of Maryland's President, Wallace Loh, went by the book.  He placed his athletic director and head football coach on administrative leave.  He compelled the severing of the university's relationship with the school's strength and conditioning coach, for it seemed that even a preliminary investigation demonstrated that the coach should not be working at Maryland any more (that is a polite way of saying that the coach's behavior at a minimum left a lot to be desired and at a maximum was grossly negligent).  He hired investigators to dig deeply into the death of a 19 year-old young man, the types of investigators who know that you keep turning over rocks until there are no more rocks to turn over.  Those investigators provided a 192-page report that expressed reservations -- some serious -- about the culture within the football program at Maryland.


Loh, displaying an appropriate sense of, if not adherence to, good university governance, shared the report with the Board of Regents, and the inference here is that he intended to fire the football coach.  That led to a donnybrook apparently with the Chair of the Board, who ostensibly told Loh that he couldn't do that.  Loh perhaps said, "well, if that's the case, let's negotiate my exit from the university.  I cannot work here anymore."  (Whether because he thought his authority was undermined or because the Chair's judgment was so poor remains an open question to me).  So, the Regents and Loh put together a statement that said the A.D. and Durkin would be reinstated, and that Loh would be leaving in say eight months.  Put differently, Loh probably thought, "This is bleep, and if that's how they want to run this place, I'm out of here."  Both the Regents and Loh put as good a face on his exit as they could have, motivated, perhaps, by Loh's desire to get good severance from the university (in other words, he had motivation not to torch the reputation of the place).  That's how these things work.


What Wallace Loh did was speak truth to power.  What Wallace Loh did apparently was stand up for the harder right decision.  What Wallace Loh did was make a statement that character matters in the short and long runs and that a student's life is more precious than winning a football game or games with a certain coach.  What Wallace Loh also did was ensure that if a university employee created a culture that led to a death under these circumstances, he/she would not have a job with the university.  Wallace Loh did the right thing.


And it cost him his job.  That said, who would want to work for a Board of Regents or a Chair who felt so compelled to restate D.J. Durkin that he put the university's relationship with its president on the line?  Who would want to work at a university where the football coach's future was more important than straightening out a culture that he perpetrated than a young man's life.  Of course, no corrective action will bring back Jordan McNair.  But what it can do is set an ironclad tone that will ensure that players are cared for on and off the field, in real time, and are not bullied or shamed.  Challenging them is one thing, but mistreating them is another.


Wallace Loh can work at my university, were I to work at one.  He can be its president because what he did was to take a stand for doing the right thing over, well, the omnipotence of the football program, a football program that struggles almost yearly and is an arms race to be a championship team with little chances of doing so.  It is about time that a university president focused on character and integrity at the expense of a revenue-producing program.  And that's a Division I problem.  You know, in Division III, the coaches don't make a ton and they certainly don't make more than the college president.  But where you pay them millions in Division I, they own the school (like the old banker's line -- "lend someone $100 dollars, you own them; lend someone $100 million, and they own you).  Loh said enough is enough. 


Okay, it wasn't perfect.  Why didn't he stick with his plan to fire Durkin the day before, consequences with the Board chair be darned?  Only he can tell us that.  And, yes, there was a huge outcry from students, faculty, alumni about Durkin, mostly totally negative.  Even some players refused to meet with the reinstated coach, and some walked out of the meeting.  So you can argue that he watched the wind and blew with it.  Mostly a fair point, except that he did not rescind his agreement to resign, which is telling because it means that Loh had little to gain by sticking to his principles a day late and terminating Durkin. 


But he reclaimed his conscience and the moral authority of the President of the University of Maryland to have one of the last words, if not the last word, on matters of principle that matter the most. 


Wallace Loh did the right thing.  So will another university when they hire him as president.