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Northwestern University stands accused of tolerating a pervasive hazing culture and toxic environment that extended beyond the football team into baseball, softball, volleyball and other sports.
On July 24, a former NU athlete filed another in what is now a string of lawsuits against the school, alleging physical, sexual and emotional trauma. Lloyd Yates, now 26, told the Tribune he has been haunted by nightmares and anxiety from his football experiences since he graduated in 2018.
University President Michael Schill has said current and former players told the school’s investigators that hazing included “forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature.” One player said at a news conference, “We lived in fear.”
The allegations might sound familiar to those who remember the 2013 hazing scandal involving Miami Dolphins football players Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito. They were 300-pound starters who lined up inches apart on their team’s offensive line.
Martin was less established, a coveted second-round draft pick from Stanford University, which professes to combine top academics with a lucrative, prime-time football program. Incognito was a bruiser from the University of Nebraska once voted the “NFL’s dirtiest player,” who nevertheless held a leadership role in the Dolphins locker room.
According to an investigation published after the fact, Incognito and other offensive linemen tried to mold Martin in their goon squad image. The results burst into public view when Martin sat down at a training table with his teammates, who immediately got up and walked away. That was the last straw for Martin, who had been subjected to extensive harassment, including threats against him and his mother that were left on his phone in a voicemail from Incognito.
Martin fled the cafeteria and sought treatment for mental health problems worsened by the hazing, which, just like at Northwestern, became a scandal when the public got wind of it. An outcry followed, and you might think that, as a result, everything changed.
Not really.
The record shows that some owners, players and fans accept behavior that in most workplaces would result in instant termination.
Both Incognito and Martin left the Dolphins, but Martin never regained his form and soon retired from the game after earning $3.74 million over his career, according to the Over the Cap football website. Incognito, ringleader of Martin’s harassment, went on to a longer, more successful career, reportedly retiring with earnings of $34.4 million.
An NFL spokesman said that after the Dolphins hazing episode, the league provided guidance to clubs and players on workplace conduct and harassment issues. “These mandatory training sessions were later expanded in 2014 to include more education on matters such as domestic and sexual violence” — after star running back Ray Rice was caught on video battering his fiancee.
The NFL has a personal conduct policy that covers harassment and bullying, but it never adopted a specific policy about hazing, the spokesman confirmed. Some efforts to single out young players, such as requiring rookies to sing their college fight songs at training camps, he said, “would not be an issue” under the existing rules.
Hmm. How about requiring newbies to carry the sweaty pads of veterans off the practice field each day? Or to deliver sandwiches and fast food on demand? Or to pay the five-figure bills at steakhouse dinners where veterans deliberately over-order the costliest food and drinks? Or to sit still while veterans cut their hair into phallic mohawks, or shave off their eyebrows? Or to take it in stride when they’re taped helplessly to goal posts?
Chicago Tribune Opinion
Those and other “pranks” are part of football lore, and they rarely become public controversies as the hazing of Martin did. Even after Martin had been driven off the Dolphins, some of his teammates defended hazing, as when defensive end Cam Wake told USA Today that those joining the privileged “brotherhood” of the NFL must expect to pay their “dues.”
Northwestern has come under fire from multiple angles, with some alumni, fans and donors expressing outrage at the hazing, while others are just as angry about the treatment of popular head football coach Pat Fitzgerald, who Schill at first suspended for two weeks, then decided instead to dismiss entirely.
In a recent note to the “Northwestern community,” Schill promised to investigate all allegations of hazing, create safeguards so that “what happened in football can never happen again at Northwestern,” and support students and staff “unfairly implicated by a broad brush.”
For those who wonder how Schill could have ever considered a two-week suspension sufficient punishment for a long-serving coach who has said he had no clue that any hazing was ever occurring, consider the example set by the NFL.
Once the uproar blows over at Northwestern, don’t be surprised if not much has changed. The only way to reform a toxic culture is if all those involved, including the leading players and the biggest fans and supporters, decide that it must change.
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