@Blammm

“…and I assume that they follow the same procedure for making practice decisions.”

So you state you are making assumptions and then spend the rest of your comment talking as if it is a fact. The coaching staff dresses people down all the time, that’s normal. That doesn’t mean they are in charge of every group.

If I screwed up continuously as a manager, the coaching staff would surely complain, but it wouldn’t be their decision to dismiss me. That would come from the staff within the manager group. Sure, such a decision can be influenced by the coaching staff, but it isn’t their call.

By the way, Klunder and Collins work directly under Kelly, using them as an example of how every other group works is very poor.

The issue in the Declan case was two-fold: there was no official chain of command between each group and as, Terry pointed out below, there wasn’t a safety rep in place to specifically have authority to overrule anyone.

So what you are left with is several autonomous groups trying to work together as best they can to run everything smoothly and assist the coaching staff. That is a very, VERY poor way to run anything and was easily the biggest issue I had during my time as a student manager.

For someone that started out commenting here that ResLife was using a poor standard of evidence, I find it hilarious that you have been able to basically determine that Kelly was guilty purely by the same standard. And for someone that is a lawyer, I find it doubly hilarious that you don’t see that anyone being forced to fall on a sword would’ve had immediate grounds for a lawsuit. You can’t fire someone who had no specific outlined responsibility for safety whether it’s Kelly or the guy in charge of the AV team.

Now had, say either Declan had refused to go up in the lift or had his supervisor refused to allow him to AND THEN Kelly demanded he get up there, yeah, can his ass. But that didn’t happen.

No one, and I repeat, NO ONE took the time to consider “hey this is dangerous, we should reconsider this plan of action.” While I credited Weis in the post I linked for making sure the manager staff got jackets while we were freezing our asses off, nearly half the practice passed before he did anything about it. And this is while we were actively complaining! Say, I contracted pneumonia before I got the jacket and I had complications with my asthma and died — would Weis be to blame for not noticing sooner? I don’t think so.

Declan’s death was an institutional failing by the ENTIRE University for having zero safety net planning for staff during practices, leading to everyone ignoring the potential danger and just going about their business. And let’s not forget, an independent organization came to that very same conclusion (hey look, EVIDENCE!). Looking for a specific person to be fired is simply looking for a scapegoat.

I was much more involved in ND football than you are aware so don’t immediately discredit my knowledge of the inner workings of ND football. Although I never worked with Kelly, I know pretty much all the support staff that were holdovers from the Weis era and I assume that they follow the same procedure for making practice decisions. These employees don’t think in an independent manner. They do as they are told in order to keep their jobs. Coaches did regularly dress down the video crew for not taping at the right vertical and horizontal angle. Just because you didn’t see the coaches instructing the staff on the field at practice doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There is a regularly executed, albeit informal procedure for making a decision about whether to practice indoors in the event of bad weather. Given that the head coach always makes the call in these situations, I am confident that Kelly instructed them to practice outside. Do you really think no one recognized the threat? I remember that storm vividly. I cancelled my planned run because the headwinds were so strong that I knew that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. If someone, say Klunder or Collins, did recognize the threat, do you think that they would second guess Kelly’s decision? Furthermore, I find the fact that no one took the fall for the decision to have the video crew go up and stay up there in high winds to be a rather candid admission of who is directly responsible.

Sometimes it is said that ND blew the Urban Meyer hire; however, the opposite is true. By all accounts, when Meyer interviewed for the ND job after Willingham’s departure, the dealbreaker was that ND wouldn’t go along with Meyer’s request for more leniency in admitting recruits. The failure of the hire was on Meyer because ND stuck to their policy of “doing it the right way.”
Meyer went to Florida where he knew recruiting would have fewer barriers. In addition, he became the greatest poacher of verbally committed recruits to ND. One thing is indisputable–Meyer is a great coach. So without the recruiting obstacles and ResLife discipline that he would have had at ND, Meyer went into orbit, winning two national championships and having a Heisman winner to boot.
After this success had occurred, Meyer made a great mistake in an interview–he told the truth. He admitted that ND was his “dream job.” How funny it was to see him realize that he “goofed” and go into the damage control mode. He swore his love for Florida and promised that he would be there for many years. A year later he left Florida complaining of mental stress and depression. Is it Urban Meyer or Urbane Liar we are talking about?
Apparently, he was miraculously healed after he spent a year in the broadcasting booth, but it was still the same old Urban, hooking up with a new rogue football factory that was on suspension. But give the devil his due–the guy can coach. 12-0 in the first season isn’t bad.
Finally, Urban must view ND’s recent success with great ambivalence. Kelly could do it, certainly he could have, too. Because the fact is that ND is really Urban’s dream job, but he just didn’t want to do it the right way–ND’s way. If ND agreed to Meyer’s original requests and hired him, we would have several national championships by now, but ND would truly have sold its soul for football success.

Regarding your comment edit: I’m not going to allow anecdotal stories of what happened to a third party based on hearsay to appear on this site, especially when it contains a very sensitive subject matter.

You are welcome to disagree with me, but please use logical arguments not based in “I heard this happened before”. Your first comment toed that line and your second one went past it. Watch your step, please.

That being said, I completely disagree with your assessment. I’m not saying ND should ignore the need for evidence, but that the standard of proof isn’t as stringent as a legal proceeding.

As far as Jenkins recusing himself, I said in the post that I understand why he did, but feel he should’ve realized the pain of a part of the Notre Dame family was worth at least having a sit-down, especially when the father publicly stated that he didn’t expect the DA or disciplinary hearings to go any different than they did.

And I’m really not sure how you are so certain it was Kelly’s call to send Declan up the lift. In fact, I’ve watched that video team function and they do so practically independent of the coaching staff much like the managers and trainers operate autonomously as well. You can blame him for failing to suggest he come down, but a no doubt “the buck stops here”? I don’t think so.

Well said! Although I personally haven’t had to deal with that kind of trauma, I have known of three friends who have gone through it (two of which I counseled through the experience and the third of which I didn’t find out about until years later). I treat these matters seriously and with an open mind. I just don’t see how yelling to the media has helped in any way, shape, or form.

Also, I am not a jingoistic defender of ND either. I still think Kelly should have been fired for the Sullivan tragedy (as I know its the head coach’s call) and a winning record doesn’t change my views on that.

“I think the fact that Seeberg committed suicide changes the gravity of the whole situation and leads people to think with pure emotion as opposed to reason.”

Her death is also the ultimate reason why no resolution can truly come to this case. From my understanding of her accusation, the assault was in the form of touching, which may have been extremely traumatic for her, but doesn’t leave physical evidence. This case essentially then comes down to he said/she said, and those cases are notoriously difficult and rife with gray areas. Then upon her death, the prosecution lost the she said – they lost the ability to have a complaining witness. Since her death was at her own hand, not that of the accused, and since she had never been sworn in to testify, her words legally could not be used in court. Without being able to prove the player’s guilt, the courts – and ND – cannot and should not punish him. Not as long as we ascribe to Blackstone’s formulation: “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

I understand that the Seeburgs are in pain and that many individuals feel a strong visceral reaction by this case. How could they not? But there was just really nothing else that could have been done after her death. (Now, how things were handled before her death is a separate issue, but one it appears ND is trying to ameliorate.)

And I say this as a woman who has been through the lovely experience of rape, so I’ve thought about this tragedy with great care and am not simply trying to jingoistically defend my alma mater.

I didn’t mean to use the legal standard in that sense.

I don’t think any ND student should be subject to punishment unless it is more likely than not that they are guilty of what they were accused. Otherwise, you run the risk of vindictive or exploitative people creating charges for a whole slew of inappropriate reasons.

[Mod Edit: I’m removing this part of the comment, see reason below ~ Tex]

If ResLife wants to lower the standard to something below a preponderance of evidence standard, then they might as well not bother with the hearings because the accuser’s side will always win out every time.

In regards to the critique of the Seebergs’ handling of the affair, I don’t really know how things could have been done any other way. The ResLife staff isn’t exactly biased in favor of football. They’ve been know to make examples of the players from time to time. Furthermore, the majority of their staff (at least when I was there a short while ago) was female, reducing any concern that these matters weren’t handled with an appreciation of womenhood. Jenkins (a guy who I strongly disagree with more often than not) was right to recuse himself, given the manner in which the case might come before him as the final arbiter of discipline in the university. The remedies imposed by the Feds (a trained resource coordinator, the elimination of a confrontation right, the victim’s right to appeal any decision reached by a campus disciplinary board, and an immediate Title IX investigation to determine whether sexual harassment occurred) probably would not have made a difference here. I think the fact that Seeberg committed suicide changes the gravity of the whole situation and leads people to think with pure emotion as opposed to reason. That fact is irrelevant as to the issue of what punishment should be dispensed to the student athlete. The media was wrong to make this a front page story for the whole nation. If Seeberg’s story was proven true, then the player should have been punished. A review by both the university and the state failed to adequately corroborate that story. There’s no reason why the Seebergs couldn’t have civilly approached this in a productive manner. There was no battle to be won in the media. It was just a smear campaign.

The law’s definition of sexual assault in Indiana is an unwanted touching made for sexual gratification involoving the use of force or threat of force. Under this definition and unwanted sexual touching is not, in and of itself, a crime. Without the use of force or threat of force, it is not sexual assault. It may be something else – like civil assualt – and it may be crude and rude, but it is not the serious crime of sexual assault.

This is one reason Dvorak cited for not bringing criminal charges. Ms. Seeburg’s statements on their face, even if true, did not state a crime. She did not allege the use of force or threat of force. Being scared does not mean that there was force or threat of force.

Of course, Res Life has its own standards, which do not look to criminal standards. Right or wrong, they can (and have) applied lower standards to impose punishments.

The Declan Sullivan case. I worked as a union laborer for 36 years and 3 of them were spent in South Bend. I spent some time on scissor-lifts both in South Bend and other places, so I know they are scary and I can only imagine how scary they are when you’re 35 or 40 feet up. As for how scary they can be when you’re 40 feet up and the wind is blowing – I never found that out for the simple reason that if those were the conditions outside and the lifts were to be used outside – I would NOT HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO GO UP. There was always a safety man on the job and there was my craft steward, either of whom had the authority to say that. Plus I could simply refuse and they would be there to back me up.

Declan Sullivan had no such safety net.

Notre Dame stated in its report that there was no one person who could be held responsible for the tragedy. Correct as far as it goes, but what it does NOT say is this – There was no one person who had the authority to say – “It’s too dangerous. No one goes up today.” When you are dealing with 20 year old kids who think they’re going to live forever and who also realize that they need to work to help their folks pay their tuition they are not likely to refuse to go up. I am NOT stating that he was threatened, but I AM saying that there should have been someone there with the authority to say “It’s ok kid – it’s too dangerous to go up today. Don’t worry about your job.” The fact that there was NOT such a person there is to me the crux of the matter. I believe that the University’s lawyers would agree with me, but of course that is just my opinion.

I don’t have any particular interest in attacking a certain piece or a writer.

I am aware though of the author and pieces in question and, of all the problems that I have with them, her reporting of another alleged rape isn’t one of them. If she had enough sources tell her the same story, she has more than enough right to run it.

Also, be aware that victims of sex crimes are usually kept anonymous. This means that any and all identifying information is kept out of the news and that can definitely include names of people associated with the victim.