After mounting an unsuccessful defense during two July 16 appearances on talk-radio, Papitto effectively deflated the controversy when he requested that his name be removed from RWU’s law school. Media interest in the story mostly faded, with reporters and talk-show hosts gravitating to the alcohol-related death of a 17-year-old in Barrington and a charitable fund established by the owners of the Station nightclub.
In time, there will be stories charting changes in the composition of RWU’s board of trustees, and perhaps looking at how well the boards of other Rhode Island institutions reflect the communities that they serve. Yet even now, it’s clear that the Papitto controversy reflected some familiar lessons.
A bad response is worse than the offense
For a striking example of how expertly private educational institutions process their own dirty laundry, consider how it has taken Brown University a few hundred years to try to come to terms with its own considerable involvement in the slave trade. Whether this would have happened without the presence of the first black female president of an Ivy League university is another question.
Still, the response to Papitto’s use of the N-word during a May 2 RWU board meeting is far from a textbook example of crisis-management.
Mike Doyle of the RDW Group, the Providence-based public-relation company, who was hired as a spokesman for the RWU trustees, squarely puts the blame, without naming her, on trustee Dr. Barbara Roberts’s decision to go public via the ProJo. “I think the board was addressing this in a discreet manner from the get-go,” Doyle says. “There was never a matter of accepting this. One board member chose to make this a public spectacle. She acted on her own, unilaterally, in a manner that ultimately tarnished the reputation of the university.”
. . . .
Yet the board’s efforts would have had a lot more credibility if they had been started before April, when Roger Williams was the subject of a “Notice of Concern” from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Among the concerns cited by the regional accreditation group was a lack of diversity on the 16-member RWU board, which was composed of 14 white men and two white women at the time. (Not coincidentally, the board was stacked with people close to Papitto.)
And as [Jennifer] Jordan made clear in her initial story, Roger Williams opened itself to a perception that it was sugar-coating the situation when it said in a news release that Papitto’s July 9 departure from the RWU board (which he had been on for about 40 years, and chaired for the last 18) was motivated by his age and a desire to spend more time with his family. That the university has since taken this news release off its Web site indicates some level of discomfort with it.
Get ahead of the story or it will run you over
Americans talk about race only during a crisis
Americans talk about race in a superficial way
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