In November, an extraordinary videotape showing Rutgers basketball players being physically and verbally abused at practice by their ranting coach, Mike Rice, came into the possession of university officials. With Rutgers intent on becoming a first-tier power in the lucrative world of university athletics, officials at the New Jersey institution foolishly sought to minimize the damage by announcing a three-game suspension of Mr. Rice and a $50,000 fine, while keeping the extent and details of his misbehavior vague.
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But the tape surfaced Tuesday and went instantly viral on the Internet, leaving the nation appalled at the sight of Coach Rice's yelling homophobic slurs at his players, repeatedly pushing and kicking them for perceived mistakes, and furiously punctuating his supposed lessons in sportsmanship by hurling basketballs point-blank at their heads and torsos. It was a shameful display of the winning-is-everything ethos that can consume moral judgment in the pursuit of mainline college sports victories.
Mr. Rice has now been fired, but it is hard to see how Tim Pernetti, the athletic director, can keep his job. Mr. Pernetti saw the tape and was thus aware of the abuses before signing off on what amounted to an expensive slap on the wrist. The overseers of Rutgers, the board of trustees, should promptly and fully investigate Mr. Pernetti's role and that of other senior officials, up to and including the university president, Robert Barchi.
Rutgers officials spent Tuesday sticking to their initial story that the punishment meted to coach Rice was "significant" for "a first offense" and did not require firing him. They reversed themselves Wednesday only after feeling the full flame of outrage from the public and New Jersey officials demanding to know why an ambitious sports program, financed by taxpayers, sought to protect Coach Rice in his reprehensible behavior, and at a salary announced at $650,000 a year when he was hired in 2010.
Mr. Barchi apologetically admitted that while he had endorsed the initial punishment proposed by Mr. Pernetti, a new look at the tape convinced them to fire the coach. Yet even this tardy epiphany seemed to hedge the university's responsibility by attributing the earlier suspension to the recommendation of an "outside investigator" hired for the job after the tape was presented to them. The tape came from Eric Murdock, the team's former director of player personnel, who said he complained about the coach last summer and was fired, but then forced university action by providing the graphic evidence in November.
Any unvarnished investigation must find out who at Rutgers knew what, and when. More broadly, it must ask whether and to what extent their judgment was skewed by the university's growing commitment to big-time sports. Rutgers is to join the Big Ten Conference next year and paid a past football coach in excess of $2 million a year in heated pursuit of a national championship.
Ultimately, this is also the question the N.C.A.A., the regulator and commercializer of university athletics that have become a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry, should be asking itself. Critics like Walter Byers, a former N.C.A.A. executive director, have complained of a "neo-plantation" system of college sports in which athletes are pawns while high-priced coaches and athletic directors — under pressure to win — exercise the power of kings. The Rutgers tape is a timely warning not only to Rutgers but to university presidents everywhere as the final games of the N.C.A.A.'s basketball tournament play out before the nation.
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