"It's time for answers," Free Press sportswriter Drew Sharp tells the University of Michigan in a column about the expulsion of a football player accused of sexual assault four years earlier.
Answers should come to restore some lost credibility and ease suspicions that Michigan football indeed wags the tail of the university.
Sharp is following up on Tuesday's news that starting kicker Brendan Gibbons, above, was kicked off campus permanently last month because a university inquiry found that evidence suggests he's responsible for a November 2009 assault of an 18-year-old freshman at the Chi Psi fraternity house -- conduct deemed “so severe as to create a hostile, offensive or abusive environment,” according to The Michigan Daily campus paper. Three days after the finding of responsibility last Nov. 20, the 22-year-old senior played against Iowa and scored three points.
Sharp questions whether football coach Brady Hoke and athletic director Dave Brandon knew about the determination by UM's Office of Student Conflict Resolution before the Nov. 23 game.
There are inconsistencies that demand clarification. . . .
The longer [UM] goes without answers, the more probing the questions become. This isn’t going away anytime soon.
Brendan Gbbons, a fifth-year senior from Florida, was expelled in late December -- more than four years after an 18-year-old freshman told police he raped her.
Similar criticism comes from a second editorial this week on the case in the student daily, headlined "A shameful response."
In the last two days, the University has neglected any opportunity to speak out and address the public criticisms directed toward it. Instead, administrators have invoked a number of furtive internal policies and vaguely interpreted laws to explain its silence. . . .
Unless it is school procedure to allow a student-athlete in violation of the Student Sexual Misconduct Policy to participate in university-sanctioned athletic events, there was a complete and utter breakdown in communication. University officials . . . knowingly allowed a perpetrator of sexual misconduct to represent the school in a football game that undoubtedly generated profit for the university. This is unacceptable on any level. . . .
Doubt in the university’s innocence is sinking in as the administration continues to withhold answers.
An Ann Arbor police investigation ended without criminal charges.
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