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Lessons of the fall

The reaction swiftly broke into two sharply divided schools of thought: One, the seemingly broader view, was that Papitto and his allies on the RWU board had tried sweeping the matter under the rug while punishing the three trustees who spoke against him. A less widely subscribed view, albeit one maintained by a spokesman for the board, is that RWU was acting to correct shortcomings in institutional stewardship, and that a dissident trustee enflamed the situation, damaging the university’s reputation in the process, by going public.
 
Regardless, four days later, 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.”