Column: 50 Years Later, Re-Evaluating My
Old School
Paul Keane
For the Valley News
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Maybe I’ve gotten too big for my britches. It’s been 50 years
since I graduated from Ithaca
College and I don’t even
read the alumni magazine anymore. For a while, in the 1980s, rumor had it that Ithaca had “made” Playboy’s
list of “Best Party Schools.” But that was just a rumor. It is currently way
down, at No. 23, on a list of top New
York party schools.
But that was the way I had come to think about Ithaca over the years: as a party school that
never dared to rock the intellectual or political boat. Its most famous
graduate is the host of ABC’s World News Tonight — and speaks so
fast you’d think the world is ending.
I guess I had gone onto bigger and better things, or so I
convinced myself: After Ithaca, I earned degrees from a huge state university
in 1972, a great Ivy League university in 1980 and, finally, an elite sub-Ivy
college in 1997. I hadn’t seen the name Ithaca College
for decades, except on alumni propaganda, until 2016.
That’s when it showed up on the front page of The New York
Times.
The college’s president, Tom Rochon, had been hounded into resigning after
being accused by students of insensitivity to racial issues. Maybe Ithaca was at last
throwing off its party school reputation and embracing the great political
issues of the day.
I had created the college’s first teach-in 50 years ago, in the
1968-69 school year, on the same topic that propelled the college to the front
page of the Times:
Racism. (Actually, I stole the idea from Cornell University.
That Ivy League school, which sits on a hill opposite from Ithaca College,
had shut down for a weeklong “Teach-in on Racism” in response to its own
paralyzing race-related crisis. But that’s another story.)
So it seemed a bit late to me, in 2016, after 50 years of
silence, for Ithaca
College suddenly to
decide to deal with the issue of racism.
False alarm. After raising the racism banner, Ithaca faded back into oblivion — in the
news, and in my mind, for two more years.
That’s when I learned about Shirley Collado, Ithaca’s new president and the first person
of color to be appointed to that post. What an eye opener! Then Google told me
that The
Ithacan, the college’s otherwise ho-hum student newspaper, had
reported in January 2018 that Collado had pleaded no contest in 2001 to a
sexual assault charge during the time she was training as a trauma therapist at
the Psychiatric Institute of Washington.
That doesn’t sound like the timid little party college I had
been ignoring for decades. Read on, thought I.
Bureaucracies and presidents, I believe, traditionally engage in
“benign neglect and intransigent equivocation,” a phrase I invented decades ago
to describe how many administrators behave. It means ignore accusations, muddy
the waters with meaningless words and hope the problem will go away. But during
her interviews for the Ithaca post, instead of a covering up or issuing
denials, Collado responded openly and frankly to the search committee’s
questions about why she pleaded no contest to one misdemeanor charge of putting
her hand on a patient’s body outside of her clothing.
Collado, who was 28 at the time of the incident, denied
allegations that she had a sexual or romantic relationship with the patient,
and said the woman was no longer her patient during the short time she stayed
in her home.
Collado said she was emotionally vulnerable at the time because
her first husband had recently committed suicide, and she granted that, in
retrospect, her friendship with a former patient had been a mistake based on
that vulnerability.
In other words, she is human.
She didn’t have the money to fight the charge, so she did what
many people do in those circumstances — she pleaded no contest, which allowed
her to maintain her innocence while ending the proceedings. She received a
30-day suspended sentence, and 18 months of probation.
All of this Collado has recounted publicly.
Wow. In one stroke, my humble little college was suddenly
involved in almost all of the major controversies of 2018: gender fluidity,
race and gender discrimination, sexual assault, gay relationships, justice and
money, power dynamics in professional relationships, and the First Amendment.
While I feel terribly for Collado’s former patient and what she
went through, to tell the truth, I’m proud of little Ithaca College and the
courageous behavior of its faculty, its board of trustees and its tiny student
newspaper: No cover-up; face the problem squarely; acknowledge redemptive
behavior; offer forgiveness; move on.
And I’m a bit embarrassed that I got so big for my britches that
I ignored my first alma mater for two decades.
Did I mention that when I left Ithaca
in 1969, I went to graduate school in Ohio at
a university named Kent
State? Within six months,
on May 4, 1970, it became the most notorious university in the world after Ohio
National Guardsmen shot into a crowd of student demonstrators, killing four and
wounding nine others.
Kent State’s board of trustees and the Ohio courts then adopted
a strategy quite unlike that taken by Ithaca College: Blame others; muddy or
cover-up the facts; protect institutions; let decades pass; and then, and only
then, reluctantly acknowledge reality. History will judge how that approach
worked out for Kent
State.
Maybe The Ithacan, Ithaca
College’s gutsy little
student newspaper, is reminding us all of something we need to remember: The
mission of the Academy — even a former party school — is the pursuit of truth.
Is half a century too late for this prodigal alumnus to resize
his pants and say he’s proud to reclaim his status as a graduate of Ithaca College?
Paul Keane, Ithaca
College Class of 1968, lives in Hartford.
