Dori: Public universities use your tax dollars as hush money

The Seattle Times had two great stories about the problems going on behind closed doors at our public universities.

First, reporter Mike Baker wrote a story about college students getting hush money from public universities here in Washington — universities funded by our tax dollars.

According to the article, two students at Central Washington University filed a complaint that the music professor had kissed them on the face and made comments like, “I love you.” After a review, one of them stated that she was being dropped from her performance major because she filed a complaint. So the university came up with a solution — give them free tuition for a year, along with other benefits like private tutoring.

In other words, hand over our tax dollars for hush money.

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That is your money that you work hard for, that you pay in tax dollars. It’s being used so that these students will keep quiet about problems at our universities, as the professors continue to teach. The Times found a similar hush money case at Western Washington University.

And then reporter Asia Fields had a story about a University of Washington student who reported sexual assault by the former associate athletic director, Roy Shick. What courage from this former Husky volleyball star in reporting this. According to her testimony, Shick had offered to drive her home from a Tyee Club event, then sexually assaulted her in his vehicle.

The university launched an investigation and found her story to be credible. So what does UW do? They allowed Roy Shick to resign and then he got hired as vice president of advancement at Grand Canyon University in Arizona. But there was no record of what he allegedly did to this volleyball player. So a guy who allegedly did some really horrible things just quietly gets shuffled from a public university to a private one. Luckily, when Grand Canyon University found out about Shick’s alleged crimes from the Times, they fired him.

This is the culture that is in our public universities, that our tax dollars are paying for. I know really bad people who have gotten shuffled from job to job at the high school level. Here it is at the university level.

It’s your tax dollars at work — bad people get protected and the system is broken.

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