Rutgers officials are having a bad year. It seems they have a communication problem in Piscataway. School officials and search committee members didn't know about a lot of things. Things like the pregnancy lawsuit at Tennessee, they had no idea Julie Hermann's former volleyball team wrote a letter alleging her abuse, and weren't made aware new men's coach Eddie Jordan never graduated from college. Oh, the higher-ups did know about the Mike Rice practice tapes, they just didn't act on them until they went public.
The whole thing is amazing and ironic to me. What are the odds that when a lunatic coach is exposed and fired, and the AD who tried to protect him is let go, we learn the coach's successor had not earned a degree and the AD's replacement once fired a coach after a sex discrimination complaint.
This Julie Hermann is something. As volleyball head coach at Tennessee her team wrote a letter to the AD claiming Hermann's treatment caused them to hate the sport. Her assistant coach sued her (and won) because Hermann threatened to fire her if she became pregnant. Then, as assistant AD at Louisville, she was again sued when it was alleged she fired an assistant track coach because she went to the university HR department to complain of discriminatory treatment from the head coach.
That's the ironic part, here is the amazing part. The dirt on Hermann came to light not from the vetting of the search committee but rather from reports in The Newark Star-Ledger. Craig Wolff broke the story of the dissatisfaction the '96-'97 team had with Hermann. Where was this first discussed? Get ready, it was from postings on FACEBOOK. Turns out when Hermann was named AD at Rutgers some of the former Vol players began facebooking each other with the news. Wolff then contacted the former players to get their story.
The twenty-six member search committee relied on Parker Executive Search Firm to identify candidates for the position. Parker claims it made Rutgers aware of the two lawsuits in which Hermann played a central role. But neither Rutgers nor Parker was aware of the two page letter that her players wrote in 1997, saying she abused them and forced the to "endure mental cruelty."
That was first reported by the Star-Ledger of Newark and thanks in no small part to FACEBOOK.
