The University of Oklahoma doesn’t care about the safety of women. It cares about football.
Even though I’m sure that’s not the message OU’s power brokers intended to send, the message has hit home. It doesn’t even matter if the message is true — it matters how women on this campus feel, and nothing about the last two years of Sooner football has made them feel valued.
The habit OU has made of prioritizing football over the safety of women is now well established. Frank Shannon. Joe Mixon. Dorial Green-Beckham. And now Dede Westbrook.
The decisions to either bring in or keep all four players on the team could be defended individually. Mixon, whom the whole world will see break a woman’s face in a soon-to-be-released video, and Shannon, who lost a Title IX case, were punished with missed seasons. Green-Beckham, accused of pushing a woman down a flight of stairs, and Westbrook were never convicted.
As someone who believes in “innocent until proven guilty,” especially for young black men, and who believes that college football players at major programs should be considered employees and have the right to union representation, I can contort myself into at least halfway supporting these decisions.
But the Westbrook case is different for one reason — a background check didn’t turn up that he had been arrested twice on allegations of domestic violence. It took Cody Stavenhagen of the Tulsa World to do that — something OU should have done before it ever offered Westbrook a scholarship.
If your background check fails to turn up arrests, it doesn’t mean that you have a faulty system. It means that you didn’t want to find anything in the first place.
I know none of the particulars of Westbrook’s case, but I know this about domestic violence: it’s habitual, and it’s hard to charge and convict abusers because the victims feel so vulnerable they are reluctant to testify.
For OU to have a system in place that allows someone with past accusations of domestic violence to receive a scholarship to play football here without ever having a discussion of the incident is flat-out unacceptable.
This appearance of misogyny is not just a football problem, mind you. Throw a rock into a crowd on this campus and you’ll manage to hit two deans and three vice presidents. And they’ll all be men.
When OU President David Boren — who was personally involved in the discipline Mixon received — was interviewed about sexual assault on campus this semester by OU Daily editor-in-chief Dana Branham, he used it as an opportunity to stump for his penny sales tax and said some things that can be construed as victim blaming.
This isn’t about any one player or case or hiring decision. This is about a university-wide systematic failure to make women feel like they matter.
Do I think David Boren hates women? No.
Do I think Joe Castiglione hates women? Bob Stoops? No and no.
But they’re doing a damn poor job of showing people how they really feel.
Instead, they’re sending a message to all women that is so clear it might as well be on the giant new video board everyone is so proud of.
We. Don’t. Care.
