The University of Maryland Senate Executive Committee sent recommendations to university President Wallace Loh on Monday afternoon regarding how the school should move forward amid turmoil in the athletic department.
The Senate’s executive committee — which was charged in September with reviewing the findings of separate investigations into football player Jordan McNair’s death and the football program’s culture — looked over each report, determined ways it could support its insights and sent its recommendations to Loh, said Pamela Lanford, University Senate chair-elect.
The committee’s review calls for the administration to be transparent in its implementation of the reports. But Lanford declined to elaborate further on specifics, saying that the rest of the recommendations are confidential.
Nonetheless, Lanford continued to emphasize the need for greater transparency from university administration.
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“The idea of transparency is enabled through appropriate documentation and the right people having access and being able to review it,” Lanford said. “From my personal, professional perspective, it’s always good to have an outside entity do a review.”
Overall, the goal of the committee’s review is to create additional measures to support all the findings from each review and investigation and make sure the circumstances surrounding McNair’s death don’t recur, Lanford said.
The report on the school’s football program — which detailed a culture rise with abuse and plagued by a lack of oversight — included recommendations such as changing the reporting structure for athletic trainers, educating staff on integrity and their responsibility to behave ethically and adding exit interviews for the program’s graduating athletes.
The Walters Inc. investigation, which focused on the training staff’s protocols in the wake of McNair’s death, also suggested creating an athletic medicine review board to oversee staff, adding staff radios to improve communication and updating the emergency action plan on player injuries on a day-to-day basis.
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“One of the objectives of doing this review is to be measured, and — as distressing as this situation is and will continue to be — we have to try to keep our cool, keep our heads about us, and proceed with as much care as we can,” she said.
Harry Huntley, a junior agricultural science and technology and economics major and SEC committee member, said the committee’s insight is valuable because it’s taking another overall look at the lengthy reports to find new recommendations that might have been missed.
“We can see similarities in them, and because each [report] was doing their own specific task, they might have missed something,” he said. “We have a broad look here.”
This story will be updated.
