I'm beginning to understand why Florida State is in the middle of an academic fraud scandal. Its president is clueless on a lot of issues. T.K. Wetherell showed a sometimes stunning lack of knowledge during a college football forum last week in Dallas.
The lowlights ...
T.K. to reporters: "The press, and I've dealt with them in politics, I've dealt with them now as a university president, in the five years I've been at Florida State, I have never seen anyone in the press say, "Oops, I'm sorry, I missed that one," or "I got it wrong."
I have a list in my office of about 36 issues that have been written relative to Florida State University that are factually incorrect. They have been printed, put on the TV or in the newspaper, and I can show you from an impartial standpoint, that is not a true
statement that was made. I have taken that to the given editor and shown it to him. Not one time has anybody stood up and said, "You know, you're right."
D&E: You're wrong about that one, T.K. Every newspaper that I know of prints corrections on a regular basis. You could stoke a fire with the newsprint devoted to corrections in USA Today on a daily basis. This is not to rip the four-color. It's merely to point out that we do police ourselves.
"Impartial standpoint"? You're anything but impartial. You played ball at Florida State for an assistant named Bowden. You've been president at FSU since 2003. Perhaps the editors you're approaching are the impartial ones and don't consider your gripes necessarily to be corrections.
T.K.: "You tell me you treat my athletes like students and make them abide by the same rules, et cetera. They're held to a totally different standard. It's absolutely different when you're an athlete, and probably ifyou're an athlete ... you're probably held to a different standard than you are at some other school, some other place.
"It doesn't make it right. I know it's a fact, but I think the press ought to think long and hard before they write some of those stories. It's amazing to me that I see an athlete rung up for a DUI when it's on the front page of the Tallahassee
Democrat. Two pages over, three people get murdered, and it doesn't really seem to matter."
D&E: Wow, where to start on this one?
T.K. you've got to be kidding if you don't understand that every play on your football team is a public figure. That happens the moment he signs that letter of intent, whether you like it or not. Players should be held to a higher standard. They're players, the highest profile representatives of a university in many cases.
Classy of your to use the murder analogy but it doesn't fit. "Doesn't seem to matter?" Show me a paper that doesn't properly cover a triple murder. If it wasn't for a diligent media, those murders wouldn't be covered. Neither would your misbehaving Seminoles when they step out of line. It's up to the media to be a public watchdog not "cut them some slack," as you said, when players get in trouble.
T.K: (on his school's academic scandal that broke last year) Hell's bells, they (media) had it so screwed up, they couldn't even figure it out. They had people ineligible that were walk-ons that were graduating and just didn't want to go, so they didn't go. They decided, well, they had done something in some class. We couldn't say you're wrong, and we sure as hell couldn't say you're right.
"So the press' obsession with scooping one another to find out the names, to me the press
should have controlled themselves in that case. They were the ones that were creating the feeding
frenzy, not the students, not the university."
D&E: Yeah, those tutors writing papers for football players were completely blameless. So was the academic climate at FSU that allowed it to happen.
T.K.: "I think you'd treat the athlete just like you would treat a music major or whatever. Why differentiate? Why differentiate between them?"
D&E: Because the athletes are using taxpayers money for their scholarships. Because they have to be accountable. Because they play in front of millions of people each week. Because the music major doesn't make money for the university. Because ... wait, is this guy serious?
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T.K.: "Let me suggest two things the media could do ...
"I think you ought to get out of the blog business in your newspaper, because it's severely hampering your reputations, and it's become a thing to do. If y'all want to set up a blog page over here, then blog to your heart's content, but when you do it under the name of the stpetetimes.com or whatever, people assume that you believe that and that's part of your paper. And whether you like it or not, that is you. You are accepting, I think, liability, quite frankly. But that's another issue.
"The second thing you need to do ... you call one of the coaches and you want to do a nice fluff piece on a player,
and you do your fluff piece on the player, and somewhere in there the kid said, yeah, I did something wrong in my youth, I drank a beer, I smoked dope, whatever. Well, you go write that. Maybe just one sentence in there, but you turn that in to your editor, and you know what, you don't write the headline, somebody else writes the headline. "Reformed drug dealer making a name for himself at Ohio State" is what the damn thing says. The article is really pretty good, but the headline is a killer."