NU president: No plans to fire AD over scandal

Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Senior WriterJul 24, 2023, 10:16 PM ET
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- College football reporter.
- Joined ESPN.com in 2008.
- Graduate of Northwestern University.

Northwestern president Michael Schill said he is not considering firing athletic director Derrick Gragg and isn’t concerned about his own employment status amid the football hazing scandal and other challenges with the school’s athletic programs.

In his first interview since firing football coach Pat Fitzgerald on July 10, Schill told The Daily Northwestern on Monday there is “no conversation” about Gragg’s job status and that most of the hazing allegations took place prior to Gragg’s arrival in 2021. Schill also said the “vast majority” of Northwestern’s trustees supported his decision to fire Fitzgerald, even though three days earlier he had announced merely a two-week suspension for the coach after the school finished a six-month investigation into hazing allegations.

“I don’t just make decisions and just sort of move on to the next thing,” Schill told the newspaper. “I think about what I’ve done, and I decided after further reflection that I might’ve made a mistake in coming up with the two weeks. … I think that if a leader messes up, they should own up to it, they should take responsibility. The worst thing you can do is just pretend it didn’t happen. You realize you made a mistake, and you fix it and you make the right decision, because that’s what a stand-up leader does.”

Schill said he was impacted by details of the hazing allegations, which a former Northwestern player relayed to The Daily Northwestern in a July 8 story. He also said “additional allegations” and conversations with trustees and others led him to rethink the initial discipline for Fitzgerald and reach the decision to fire the coach for cause.

Schill said no other Northwestern coaches or players have faced discipline as none were identified as culpable in the school’s own investigation. He noted that longtime football assistant Matt MacPherson was named in a lawsuit Monday as having observed certain hazing activities.

“We don’t think it’s appropriate to sweep up everybody in an allegation unless we can somehow substantiate the allegation,” Schill said. “In this case, so far, we haven’t been able to tie individuals [to this], but we’re going to investigate if people come forward with names.”

Fitzgerald’s attorney Dan Webb has alleged Schill broke an oral agreement by firing the coach after initially agreeing to the two-week suspension. Fitzgerald, who was fired for cause after 17 seasons leading his alma mater, has not filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Northwestern. Four Northwestern players have filed lawsuits against the university, with three of them naming Schill, Fitzgerald and Gragg as defendants.

Schill said he initially relied too much on Northwestern’s investigation, which did not find evidence Fitzgerald was aware of the hazing, in determining initial punishment for the coach. He told The Daily Northwestern that he met with investigator Maggie Hickey and her associate July 10 and went over the “raw testimony” of those they had interviewed. Schill concluded that Fitzgerald had failed by not trying to learn what was happening in his program.

“When you hear it, one by one, one instance of bad behavior after another, the magnitude of it hit me even more,” Schill said. “I decided that the only choice, the only moral choice, was to terminate our relationship.”