Oh, Michigan State. You just knew the nightmare wouldn’t be over when Larry Nassar was sentenced. He wasn’t molesting young women in his basement torture room — he was doing it in the public facilities of a public institution while getting paid for his services. There had to be enablers and people who turned a blind eye to it all, and maybe even some people who were doing similar things.
Now that shoe has dropped. William Strampel has been arrested.
The former dean of Michigan State University’s school of osteopathic medicine sexually assaulted and harassed four female students, and also mishandled a 2014 complaint that Larry Nassar sexually assaulted a patient, allowing further abuses by the disgraced former Olympic gymnastics physician to occur, according to criminal charges unsealed in Michigan Tuesday morning.
It sounds like he let Nassar skate by with neglect and also indulged in a bit of slimy fondling on his own.
In March 2017, Strampel told a Michigan State police officer and an FBI agent that he never followed up to ensure Nassar was adhering to the 2014 protocols, nor did he tell anyone else in the office about them, because these were “common sense” guidelines and the Title IX investigation had ultimately cleared Nassar.
The two misdemeanors are punishable by up to two years in prison and $500 in fines, according to court documents.
Strampel’s other charges — felony misconduct of a public official, punishable by up to 5 years in prison and $10,000 in fines, and misdemeanor criminal sexual conduct, punishable by up to 2 years in prison and $500 in fines — stem from a pattern of discriminatory behavior described by four former female students.
So he’s looking at, potentially, a couple of years in prison, which given his age (70) is serious stuff. And what a capstone to a long career as a distinguished medical school administrator!
At least it sounds like Michigan State is serious about cleaning house.
By the way, Strampel seems to have been quite the dirty old man. Here’s the criminal complaint, and one example.
In 2013, her third year of medical school, V-2 again met with Strampel, this time to address complaints she had about her surgical residency at a local hospital. Once again, as soon as she entered his office, he directed her to slowly turn around twice so he could look at her body. Strampel advised her that she needed to learn her place in life and asked her, “what do I have to do to teach you to be submissive and subordinate to men?”
Ugh.
That is really gross, like REALLY gross. And how does one manage to be a dean and not get that this is a really fucked up thing to do that will probably come back to bite you in the ass?
Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s possible to believe an abuser acted alone once or twice before getting caught. In Nassar’s case, we know of around 250 girls and women who made complaints about his criminal behaviour in his professional role. This is simply not possible without wilful protection from his institution.
Incidentally, PZ, you missed the astounding (and horrible) evo-psych justification for sexual assault that Strampel allegedly made:
Strampel is said to have had a video of Nassar molesting a patient. Not sure what that means . . .
You need to read the full article, PZ doesn’t even mention a lot of really disgusting behavior. Obviously the truth about Strampel must have been pretty common knowledge, and the school harbored him for decades.
“This is simply not possible without wilful protection from his institution.” (#2 above)
Below is a link to a book about a nurse who murdered possibly hundreds of people. The hospitals just kept shuffling him around. They would find some cause or other to fire him, but wouldn’t tell potential employers what they knew (or at the very least had strong reason to suspect).
I met the author at an artists colony residency. Really interesting guy, and of course there’s lots of stuff that didn’t make it into the book.
I’m an MSU alum. It was decades ago, but I got a terrific education and had a wonderful time there and this makes me very sad—and angry—indeed.
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Nurse-Medicine-Madness-Murder/dp/1455574139/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522242785&sr=1-1&keywords=the+good+nurse
Strampel advised her that she needed to learn her place in life and asked her, “what do I have to do to teach you to be submissive and subordinate to men?”
I think it’s time to start really considering whether the experiment of having men in the workplace is going to succeed. They just don’t seem to be able to keep from making everything about power and they’re way too emotional. Evolutionary psychologists have even said that men are more prone to being aggressive – even Steven Pinker has pointed out that violence appears to be on the decline, which means that at one point in the past it was an even bigger problem than it is now, therefore something.
That the school admin protected Nassar for their program at the expense of the well-being of women students was clear in news reports during Nassar’s sentencing. Strampel wasn’t the only one covering his tracks. UM suspended Kathie Klages, a women’s gymnastics coach, a year ago for discouraging a teenage student from filing a sexual assault complaint against Nassar. None of this happened without the involvement of people in positions to stop it.
cervantes @ #3 — I’m sure you’re right, but I really don’t need more details.
Matrim@1:
Whether it was ever otherwise, I don’t know (though I have my suspicions), but in the United States today, university administration (particularly at very large universities with very large budgets) is essentially just one kind of big-business management. (It has an over-layer of what I call “cargo-cult management”, as in the “teaching evaluation” crap that PZ recently posted about, which may distinguish it from at least some other big businesses, but not in a way that makes it any better.) And we have plenty of examples of people (men mostly) who manage to be(come) top management in big business and not only do not get that they’re doing a lot of really fucked up things to their employees (and customers, and communities, and…) but actually seem to enjoy doing those fucked up things, and even to believe that they have the right to do those fucked up things without ever getting bitten on the ass.
“what do I have to do to teach you to be submissive and subordinate to men?”
He’s probably a good Christian.
I think the evidence is clear: men have no business being in the workplace unless they are closely supervised.
Seriously, if nothing else, workplaces need to implement Two-Deep Leadership such that no superviser can be alone with any subordinate without another person present. All meetings need to be held in public view. Confidential meetings can be in closed offices that have enough windows such that passers-by can see if there are any improper physical activities going on.
I am not sure MSU really wants to clean house. The board appointed Engler as the interim President. Engler is a former governor who is famous for greatly reducing funds for education among other conservative efforts. He has spent most of his time since being governor as a lobbyist for conservative/anti-tax/pro-business concerns. Thus he has no real experience in reforming an institution and providing new transparent policies in order to avoid a repeat of the Nasser abuses. He is well connected politically within the Republican party which controls the state government and in particular he is well connected to the state attorney general.
In other words, he is a confusing pick to clean up and restructure MSU for the future. He is a great pick if the goal is to hide and bury as many issues and use his political ties to keep the state and other outsiders from looking too closely.
One more note about Engler: while governor, his hand-picked director of prisons became famous for obstructing any inquiry into the rampant sexual abuses and assaults of incarcerated women, to the point of forbidding federal investigators access until forced to do so by court order. Even having been so forwarded, what the investigators documented was shocking.
Oh yeah – he’s also earned a reputation for privatizating services (like previous MSU president McPherson) normally kept in-house. Engler actually privatized roadway maintenance in the Lansing area. McPherson outsourced MSU’s campus bus service to the local transit authority (CATA), pricing it out of reach for many students.
well that is one way to look at it and just a little bit funny.
I think another toxic aspect is how work is organized has to do with the authoritarian control of work and work places. I think a case could be made that these kinds of behavior are an abuse of power and their continuation rests on hierarchical organization. The goals and policies are set by outside interests and “administered” by appointed authorities of those same outside interests with as little as possible input from for the workers who must fulfill them and the “clientele” who receive the effects of them.
it still manifests the medieval roots in Oligarchy
Reading yesterday about Strampel being charged I couldn’t help but wonder if Nassar is telling the authorities whatever dirt he has on his former co-workers, taking the attitude that if he’s going down, so will they.
Usernames!,
I assume that was intended a frivolous piece of hyperbolic nonsense.
timgueguen#13–
It’s possible that’s what Nassar is doing, but the examples in the linked article show that Strampel’s behaviour took place in situations that had nothing to do with Nassar and that Nassar was unlikely to have known about. (Why would the gymnastics team physician know about Strampel’s abuse of medical students in private administrative meetings?) What I think is that the Nassar case has blown up so publicly that MSU is finally being forced to address other complaints they already had on file.
no, it wasn’t. and you clearly don’t even understand the reference.
ball’s in your court, genius.
I really think that it’s barely a slap on the wrist for what he did, no matter his age. I would be perfectly fine for him to be looking at 10-20 years. I don’t wish to read the whole article to see if he’s actually being accused of enough to be sentenced like that, but a couple of years seems like not much for what he likely did.