University Chief Benches Football Team as a Lesson

The oranges and golds of the Northeastern woods shimmer around the lush lawn at the center of the University of Rhode Island.

For a few moments this late fall afternoon, it is a campus become a painting, ringed by the shadows of weathered stone buildings, highlighted with windblown leaves. Bells ring from a turn-of-the-century hall, pealing the strains of . . . “My Way”?

A couple of students pause, shift their books in their arms and smile.

If Robert Carothers heard that song at 5 p.m. on a recent Monday--and he probably did because he lives right around the corner--he might also have smiled. And shaken his head in amazement.

His recent decision, unmatched in the annals of college football, has caused tension among students, anger among football players, dismay among athletic officials.

And national acclaim from those who have been waiting for someone running a school and a sports program to put them in their proper order.

Carothers, in his fifth year as university president, was recently confronted with this ugliness:

At least six of his football players charged into a fraternity house and allegedly beat up three members while as many as 25 other players surrounded the house to ensure that nobody could leave.

Carothers, after conducting his own investigation, forfeited the Rams’ next game, at the University of Connecticut on Oct. 19.

And he didn’t suspend just the six players who allegedly were in the frat house, or the 25 who were outside. He essentially suspended the entire squad, all 72 players, for the one game.

He said if members of a team couldn’t adhere to acceptable standards of behavior, then, for one weekend, there would no longer be a team.

And he did it before any of the players was charged with a crime.

The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. was stunned, saying that in its 90-year history, nobody had ever forfeited a game for those reasons.

Hurricanes, yes. Measles, yes. But to throw in the towel for poor off-field behavior? What in the name of Miami was happening here?

“There will just be an asterisk,” Carothers said, shrugging.

The University of Connecticut was outraged, claiming the forfeit cost the school at least $150,000 in gate receipts.

“I told them to send me the bill,” Carothers said.

Carothers’ own athletic staff was miffed, wondering why he couldn’t suspend 10 players each for three consecutive weeks, amazed that he would jeopardize conference championship hopes for a 3-3 team that needed every win.

“When your child does something wrong, you don’t wait three weeks from now to respond,” Carothers said.

Today, Rhode Island plays its first game since the incident, against Boston University. It is homecoming.

Carothers will attend with his wife and 9-year-old son, cheering the players, drinking in the pageantry. And unlike many others, some of them university presidents, he will understand.

“This is not about football,” Carothers said, running his hands through his gray beard. “This is about community standards. This is about character.”

*

It started, as these things sometimes do, on a slow Friday night in a small college town.

There is not much more in the rural village of Kingston than the 14,000-student university, founded in 1892, renowned for its study of the rough Atlantic Ocean only 6 miles away.

Since Carothers’ ban of alcohol on campus several years ago, the late-night action is at fraternity houses, where students flock for the best undercover parties in town.

On the night of Oct. 3, into the Theta Delta Chi house, into one of these parties, strode two freshman football players.

They were looking for fun. They found trouble. There was a fight, and the two players were thrown out of the house. One alleged that he was hit with a baseball bat, a charge frat members deny.

Three days later, the players returned. This time, they were with 29 teammates.

“They had been talking about doing something, planning something out,” said Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a freshman linebacker and student senator who was not involved. “Everyone on the team knew about it.”

At 3 o’clock on a Monday afternoon, they surrounded the aging frame house, forming a line in the front yard and blocking the fire escapes in the back.

One thing the players didn’t take into account: Theta Delta Chi’s house is at one of the busiest pedestrian intersections on campus.

“These guys pull up on all sides of the house, fill up the front yard, make a big commotion,” said Rob Parsons, fraternity president. “Teachers saw them. Students saw them. What were they thinking?”

According to two of the seven fraternity members who were inside the house, at least a dozen players ran inside, upstairs and into the bedrooms in search of somebody to beat up.

Four frat members said they barricaded themselves behind a thick door as players repeatedly tried to break it down.

One of the three beating victims said he tried to escape through a window but was pushed down a fire escape, then beaten.

The two others said they fell to the floor and braced for their punishment.

“It happened so fast, you just covered up,” said one. “They were hitting and kicking. You didn’t know when they would stop.”

By the time ambulances pulled up, the players had left.

One frat member was treated for an injured elbow, the two others for cuts and bruises. Upstairs in the house today, there is still blood on a couch, and blood on the back of a door.

After calm had been restored, Parsons and others walked to Carothers’ home to ask for protection.

The school president was out, but his wife promised to give him a message.

“He’ll want to hear about this,” she said.

*

Carothers, a gaunt man with a strong handshake, is a former high school basketball player. He is also a poet.

He came to Rhode Island in 1991 in hopes of turning what several magazines ranked as a top party school into a center of learning.

When he learned of the fraternity beating, he wanted to see for himself.

“I came home, my wife told me what happened, I walked over to the frat house and looked at the kids who had claimed they were beaten,” he said. “They looked like they had taken it pretty rough.”

He told campus police he wanted to see the results of the investigation as soon as possible.

In the meantime, he walked around campus, asking his own questions.

One of these trips took him to the gym the next day, where nearly 200 fraternity members had gathered to protest the beating. He ordered everyone to go home.

“I’ll take care of this, I promise you,” he said.

On Friday, Oct. 11, four days after the beating, the investigation completed, he did.

One of the players involved had reportedly confirmed the team’s plot. There were witnesses willing to name names.

Even if the Rhode Island attorney general had yet to file charges, Carothers considered his course clear.

“It had been premeditated, and they had largely acted as a team,” he said. “It had to be handled in relation to the team.”

After discussions with faculty members and athletic staff, he gathered everyone in a meeting room, pulled out a piece of chalk and wrote on a blackboard what would be done:

* The coach, Floyd Keith, would drop the two freshmen and suspend indefinitely the four other positively identified players who had entered the house, even if one of those four was Cy Butler, the team’s best player.

* The coach would also suspend, for one game, the 25 players identified as being outside the house during the attack.

* The school would establish a violence-awareness task force, bringing in speakers and promoting discussions among student groups and noted nonviolence experts.

* And, by the way, the president would forfeit the next football game, against Connecticut.

“Some people in the room swallowed a bit,” Carothers said of his decision. “But it was clear you had to do something strong. Something clear.”

At an ensuing press conference, students swallowed even harder.

“Everyone in the room was sitting forward, listening to Carothers, then when he said he was forfeiting the game--it was like everyone sat back and took a breath of amazement,” said Kevin Ryder of the school newspaper staff.

In their locker room, where Keith delivered the news, the players were equally stunned.

“Guys started crying,” Abdul-Matin said. “We were just feeling good about our season. We had a lot of momentum going. Then it was like a truck hit us.”

Connecticut, 2-2 at the time, with championship hopes of its own, also could not believe it.

When Huskie Coach Skip Holtz heard the news, he said: “What? Excuse me? What do you mean they’re not coming?”

Then there was the NCAA, which assigns Division I-AA at-large playoff berths based on records.

Flummoxed by Carothers’ decision, the governing body finally declared the game to be no contest, with neither team’s record affected.

So far as Rhode Island is concerned, it starts today’s game with a 3-3 record.

But the Yankee Conference, to which both Rhode Island and Connecticut belong, declared it a forfeit by the Rams, costing them a possible conference title and postseason berth.

In the Yankee standings, the Rams are 3-4 overall.

Fearing such confusion, Athletic Director Ron Petro had tried to dissuade Carothers.

“My colleagues from around the country have called me, saying, ‘How could you do this?’ ” Petro said. “Before anything was done, I tried to bring out the difficulties that would occur if something like this happened.

“But I have come to the understanding that we are working for a better future.”

Yet while the case is bogged down in what law enforcement officials say are paperwork problems, that future grows more uncertain in Petro’s mind.

“I mean, suppose these kids are never charged with anything?” he said. “Yeah, it’s getting a little uncomfortable.”

Carothers might have been feeling that way too, until he returned to his office on the Monday after his announcement.

His computer’s e-mail box was filled with congratulations from all over the country. He downloaded 100 messages. He soon had 100 more.

Two local newspapers nominated him for baseball commissioner. He was praised on national television and radio.

He was stunned.

“I really didn’t know what the big deal was,” he said. “This is a university. Civility is everything that we are about. I wanted to make clear our standard of behavior here.”

Every fall, Carothers addresses the university’s incoming freshmen.

“I tell them that by the time they walk across that quadrangle in four years for graduation, they should have some clarity about what they stand for, and what they won’t stand for,” he said.

As a brilliant autumn has stood firm against the early charge of winter in these Northeast woods, there is the sense of a promise kept.