Many LSU students and professors spoke out about the University’s response to Husch Blackwell’s report that revealed years of systematic mishandling of Title IX cases, in which numerous employees were found complicit.
Interim President Tom Galligan announced March 5 at a Board of Supervisors meeting that two of those employees would be temporarily suspended without pay and undergo Title IX training as a result of their negligence in appropriately reporting sexual assault cases: Executive Deputy Athletic Director Verge Ausberry and Senior Associate Athletic Director Miriam Segar.
Tigers Against Sexual Assault (TASA) President Angelina Cantelli said suspending two employees is “not enough.”
“It feels like LSU is pretending to care and trying to put on a show while there’s cameras paying attention and that they don’t care about sustainable change,” Cantelli said. “I would say a lot of people are outraged, a lot of people are upset, a lot of people are reliving their trauma.”
TASA is holding a sit-in on Monday, March 8 at the Athletics Office to call for the removal of any employees who played a role in covering up sexual assault allegations.
“Either you think that covering up sexual assault is wrong and you want all your employees to be held to a higher standard, or you don’t, and you prove that through disciplinary action,” Cantelli said. “They failed to do that.”
Mass Communication Professor Robert Mann said he was critical of the University’s decision to merely suspend two employees who engaged in “egregious, reckless behavior.”
“To me, it’s a question of institutional control,” Mann said. “Who really runs this university? I think it’s clear today that President Galligan is not allowed to run this university. The athletics director, Scott Woodward, pronounced two weeks ago that Ausberry was in the clear. That decision was made before this report was handed to the president. That tells me that this is a corrupt institution, and I don’t use the word corrupt lightly, that had already made these decisions about how these cases would be handled before the report was handed to them.”
Mann emphasized that the new recommendations and rules are meaningless without consequences for violating them, which LSU failed to implement.
Political science, international studies and Spanish junior Abbie Grace Milligan said she believed administration announcing the disciplinary actions at the board meeting was a tactic used to distract the LSU community from the indicting content of the Husch Blackwell report. Milligan also said it was clear to her that LSU made a decision about who would face penalties before the report was released, regardless of what it revealed.
“For them to make everything about those two members of administration, it was so tone deaf,” Milligan said. “It was completely uncalled for. It immediately shifted the conversation towards that. People haven’t even gotten a chance to look at the report and see what’s in it and make their own decisions about that. They completely jumped the gun, just like they did when they hired Husch Blackwell.”
Milligan said that while the University publicly announces it wants to hear from students and act on their behalf, it privately shuts Student Government representatives out of every important decision, including this one.
Aside from these critiques of administration, Milligan acknowledged that she was confident in the report as a whole.
“I have full faith in the report that it’s honest and unbiased,” Milligan said.
Galligan spoke frequently at the board meeting of changing LSU’s culture. He said that although it may take time, it was the key to solving Title IX violations at the University and the environment where sexual assault is tolerated.
Mass communication junior Mia Lejeune said that LSU’s decision to suspend two employees rather than firing them continues to promote a culture of “allowing people to get away with sexual violence on this campus.”
“I was incredibly disturbed by the lack of accountability [administration] decided to take,” Lejeune said.
During the meeting, Husch Blackwell representative Scott Schneider said that many of the LSU employees who failed to report instances of sexual assault may not have been aware of the proper Title IX procedures due to insufficient training and examples set by leadership.
“It can’t be some excuse of ‘things were so bad institutionally that they didn’t know, there was no example set for them, leadership was so bad;” Lejeune responded. “Well, if the leadership was so bad, then fire the leadership. Eventually, it all falls back on the Board of Supervisors and that’s what they’re trying to avoid. They say that no one was showing these people how to act correctly, but they were the ones who were supposed to be showing them that, so then it’s their fault.”
Some members of the LSU community have pointed out that LSU’s response to Title IX violations was only a result of a PR problem brought on by USA Today’s original report.
“Today, we are not here out of the goodness of your hearts,” LSU alumna Caroline Schroeder said at the meeting. “We are here because a national newspaper published a story in November of last year that caused a bit of a public relations problem for you. That is the only reason you are here now, pretending to solve this issue.”
“Every single person from Galligan on down who runs this university knew this was a problem and they did nothing about it until a media organization embarrassed them to take action,” Mann said. “And that is disgraceful. They should all lose their jobs for that. They should all lose their jobs. But none of them will.”
Political science and African and African American studies sophomore Tyler Hunt said the decisions made by the board seemed bureaucratic, political, and corrupt, adding that Galligan announcing the disciplinary actions at the meeting seemed like “something of a PR stunt.”
“There’s still more work to be done,” Hunt said. “There needs to be consequences for actions. This is sexual assault, this is sexual violence. If they [implement the recommendations] and say ‘are you satisfied now?’ No, for every woman out there, no we’re not satisfied. We got a little piece of the cake, we didn’t get everything we needed.”
Former LSU football player and team captain Blake Ferguson tweeted his reactions to the report. He said he is “embarrassed” to represent LSU “at the moment.
“Fire Miriam Segar,” Ferguson tweeted. “And fire Verge Ausberry.”