Sexual Assault Awareness Month may be over, but the incompetency of college administrators in the face of properly handling sexual assault endures all year long. Take a look at this hiring decision at the New Mexico State University, for example.
According to ABC affiliate KVIA, NMSU’s new men’ s head basketball coach lost his last job for committing sexual assault. And they’re going to use his status as a sexual assailant to “raise awareness” about sexual violence. I wish I were joking.
New Mexico State University is planning to use Chris Jan's controversial past as a way to raise awareness of sexual assault.
The university announced Monday that Chris Jans will replace Paul Weir as the men's new head basketball coach.
Jans, who was the head coach at Bowling Green, was fired after video surfaced of him allegedly touching a woman on the backside while at a bar.
And to make the announcement worse, the NMSU President Garrey Carruthers thought it’s a great idea—because he asked “6 or 7” women what they thought about hiring Chris Jan.
"I brought in 6 or 7 senior women here and showed them the tape and said, ok what do you think?" Carruthers said. "is that a disqualifier or not? And they said no it was not."
Funny how it wasn’t a disqualifier for New Mexico State University, but it sure as hell was a qualifier for getting fired from Bowling Green State University, Jan's previous employer. Look at what they said in his termination letter (courtesy of Huffington Post):
Your conduct has caused, and will cause, embarassment to the University, and it has detracted, and will otherwise detract from the University's reputation, the reputation of the University's athletic program, and the reputation of the Men's Basketball program.
If hiring a sexual assailant is not damaging to the reputation of New Mexico State, then I shudder to think about how low their standards go. The man Jan is replacing made a yearly salary of $250,000. If earning a quarter of a million dollars a year is supposed to be some sort of “warning” about the consequences of committing sexual assault, people are more clueless than I thought.