David Boren is slime. Btw, bell, he spoke on this at the Sugar Bowl. You know, in 2017.
NEW ORLEANS — University of Oklahoma president David Boren spoke with a small group of reporters on the field Monday night at the Superdome after OU’s Sugar Bowl victory against Auburn.
It was the first time Boren has spoken publicly since the release of the Joe Mixon tape and the subsequent press conference from Mixon and coach Bob Stoops.
In the interview, Boren defended OU’s decision to keep Mixon on campus and also had strong statements on several other topics, including OU’s background check system and Title IX office.
Below is a transcript of Boren’s comments:
(On Mixon):
There’s no excuse for violence against women, and a severe punishment was handed down. There’s also no reason to destroy the lives of young people when they make a serious mistake at age 18. What you want to do is try to set those people on the right course and have them live more productive lives in the future, and I think that’s always the right thing to do, and I don’t think that’s something that should be incited by instant opinion. Opinion changes. … Now there are people who second-guess us. And I hope what won’t be second-guessed is education institutions punishing things that need to be punished. People need to learn from those serious mistakes, but we don’t want to destroy the lives of young people that can be salvaged.
Coach Stoops said if that would have happened today, Mixon would have been kicked off:
I think it would have been very hard. I think what Bob was saying is that in 2 ½ years, a lot of opinions have changed on that subject. My opinion hasn’t changed. I think it’s wrong to ever hit a woman, no matter what the provocation, no matter what the circumstance. I think that person should always be punished, but on the other hand I don’t want to throw Father Flanagan into the dust bin of history. That wonderful character in the movie “The Priest,” he gave people a chance, and he gave young people a chance to learn from their mistakes and to make better lives for themselves. And I just read the Pope’s book, called “The Name of God is Mercy,” and I’d ask people to think a little bit before they want to reach out and let one single incident – when someone has a clean record – destroy an entire productive life. Punishment, yes. Ruining lives permanently, no.
So public perception is an influence in how you decide to punish people?
No. Not at all. And so I think we did the right thing at the time. I think we should have enacted a tough punishment, which we did. Some people talk as if we didn’t have a punishment. We did. I think after that, the job of a university, and the job of an educational institution, is to put young people on the right path, to learn from their mistakes. I hope that’s what we’ve done. I hope that’s what we’ll do 100 years from now.
There’s a perception about (OU’s SAE fraternity video), your reaction to that, how immediate it was in the dismissal:
This was immediate, too. The minute we saw the video, it was immediate. We didn’t even have any discussion about should there be punishment, should there be severe punishment, should (Mixon) continue to play on the team at that time? No. We dismissed him from the team, we didn’t even let him practice, we didn’t let him travel. That was a very harsh penalty. But what we did say was, ‘If you’ll get your life straightened out, if you’ll get on the right path and if you’ll be constructive from now on out, you do your community service, you get anger management training, you do all the other things that we’re calling on you to do … we’ll release you to somewhere else if you don’t want to measure up to those requirements that we’re putting on you,' that’s what was done at the time, and I think that's exactly right, what should have been done at the time, and I’m not one of these people that wants to be involved ... as a university president, I want to help young people learn from their mistakes and get on the right path. I’m not in the business as a university president of destroying the entire lives and entire futures of young people. If they want to get someone else to be university president that’s in the destruction business, get ’em. I’m in the education business.
Has OU considered changing its background check system or strengthening that at all?
We have one of the strongest in the country and will continue to do that. Most universities, many in the country, do not have background checks. We do. And of course in the Mixon case, we did a background check. And you know what we found? His teachers, his classmates, people in his community said he had the cleanest record that they had ever seen for a young person that age. None of these things are foolproof. You do the best you can. I think we’re a national model. We have moved our enforcement section out from under the athletics department. It’s separate. It’s in the general counsel’s office. We have one of the most active, model Title IX programs in the nation. We don’t tolerate violence against women. So we’re a model. But what I don’t ever want to be the model, I don’t want to be a model of the destruction of the lives of young people and not let young people learn from their mistakes. I think that’s wrong, and I think those people that are second-guessing it (and) rush to mob mentality about this are wrong. And I think when they sit back and reflect upon it, I don’t think they want to be in the business of destroying individuals any more than I do as a university president.
In that vein, is there any regret about the SAE incident then, because those guys were gone immediately and didn’t come back:
No. We had to because that was something that was an open-and-shut case. You have to look at every case. What does that have to do with this? That situation was totally different. So you have to really consider all the facts, and if we want to have a situation where every time something happens we think there’s some immediate answer to it without looking at the facts … Without looking at the background, without looking at what’s been happening, then no, you have to look at every case one-by-one. No, these are hard decisions. How many of you want to be in the business of deciding the future of everybody’s life based on what they did? It’s a hard decision to make. I would say that the situation was totally different. You cannot – just like we had a recent situation where we took another action – we had one of our students who said, ‘Let’s bring back a weekly lynching on all the campuses,’ and there were theses emails to the freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania. You cannot put up with that. We live in a country where you simply cannot put up with that kind of bias, that kind of racial division in our society. The situation here had to do with a young person who had an absolutely clean record of every kind before this, and we did all the background checks, and what did they tell us? It just shows you background checks are not foolproof either. And you have to look at how the students have behaved once they come to the university, and that they’ve met all the preconditions, and let me say, if he had not have met all the preconditions, there would have been zero tolerance for him not doing so. It wouldn’t have been a question about what to do.
How disappointed were you about (Mixon's) parking ticket incident:
Well, I was disappointed with that, and I made my views known about that at the time, and I insisted that he not play the next game at the time so that he would learn from it. But he is still taking counseling, he is still trying to make himself into a better man. He learned from it. You all heard what he said for himself the other day. What sort of puzzles me, is, how could the media at the time, who all had the opportunity, to see that tape when I saw, and many of them said we were too harsh, and certainly my phone rang off the wall that I was too harsh. I don’t think we were too harsh. I think all the conditions we put in place were the right conditions. On the other hand, I just go back to what I’m saying. How many people do you know, who when they were 18 years old, and they’ve never had an episode whatsoever, an unblemished record, how many made a mistake? How many people do you know who’ve never made a mistake in their lives? I think it’s a sort of rush to judgment when you say, ‘Oh, let’s destroy people’s lives and not let them have any kind of future, let’s don’t let them learn from their mistakes.’ I don’t believe in that, and if you want to say, I thought the Father Flanagan I watched in the movies when I was growing up as a young person, I thought that person was very admirable, and I still think that today.
Did the Mixon case go before Steve Ashmore in student conduct?
The Mixon case, we had several other cases, in fact, if you want to know about my own record, we had a Title IX case involving a player, Frank Shannon. The local judge wouldn’t let us enforce our punishment to keep him off the team. I took the case to the State Supreme Court. I think what a lot of people don’t understand is I might be the first person in the country to go to the Supreme Court to enforce a Title IX ruling at a university, so that’s how firmly we believe in these things, and how strongly we want to set a national example. But I think you have to look at every case, case by case. Look at the fact situation in the individual cases. And as I say, background checks are not foolproof, and you look at others who have been an important part of our team, and again, there’s a lot of discussions about that. They’ve been model situations at our university since they’ve been there. So getting people on the right track ... I think one of the greatest things, and I’ve seen this even more since I’ve become president of the university, one of the greatest things about intercollegiate sports, it is a place that provides equal opportunity for all sorts of people, whether they grew up in single-parent families, whether they grew up in poverty, or they grew up without role models, they have a chance by being good citizens at a university, by playing on a team, by playing by the rules, its one of the greatest places in America, where people can start at the bottom if we want to talk about the socioeconomic conditions and still have an opportunity to make it at the top. And we can second-guess all these things, and I think we should have tough rules, and I think we should have punishments, and I don’t find think you could find a case where we haven’t made a punishment when we thought a punishment was right. … But I just appeal to you as members of the press, you write about this all the time, you broadcast about it. Intercollegiate (sports) is a place of great opportunity for young people who grew up in poverty, who grew up in circumstances none of us can imagine. Let's don’t take away that opportunity to rise from humble beginnings and to have opportunities through intercollegiate sports, and let’s not swing the pendulum so far in the other direction that we destroy people and snuff out the possibilities for their lives instead of giving them something to build on. So I think we ought to think about that. When people play God, and they want to push people into the dust bin of future possibilities in their lives, I think that’s wrong. I think what’s right is set a punishment that’s a serious punishment. Set conditions you have to live up to that are serious and demanding and give people an opportunity to reclaim their lives and put it on the right path. I think if we stop that spirit in in intercollegiate sports, if we become too judgmental about people who grew up in circumstances very unlike ourselves, I think we’ve permanently damaged intercollegiate sports, and I think we ought to think long and hard about that.
So the Mixon case did not go before student conduct?
The Mixon case was first a criminal case, and then of course we immediately looked at it ourselves.
So it didn’t go through Steve Ashmore’s office?
The person never filed a complaint with Title IX.
Who conducts your background checks? The third party?
The third party is in compliance and it reports to the general counsel’s office, not to the athletic department.
What is the name of that third party?
The third party is the general counsel of the university. The general counsel of the university is where the Title IX office, or rather where our compliance in athletics (resides). You don’t have the athletic department judging its own compliance. You have the general counsel’s office judging it.
Is there a contract with someone for this service?
There are people hired for the service. Come and look. Come visit our Title IX office. It’s considered a model in the country, and there’s schools all across the United States coming in to look at how our Title IX office functions, because it’s all … It’s very confidential in terms of complaints. Certainly not like at some other universities where you have to go to the coach to make a complaint or somebody else to make a complaint. You come, you get an objective investigation into it, if you wish to make a complaint. Now, we can’t compel people to, but that’s where they come.
So the third party, they are employees of the university?
They are employees of the university, yes. And they are employees of the general counsel’s office.
So by a third party you mean it’s just outside of athletics?
Yes, one of the reforms nationwide has been the best practice, because for many years you had compliance inside the athletics department reporting to the athletics director, etc. That was deemed to not be independent enough or objective enough, so schools across the country, not all of them, many of them who follow the best practices follow that compliance function completely outside the athletic department, and we did that several years ago, and I think that’s the right thing to do.