Inside Higher Ed: Closing Argument
With her nearly 20-year presidency at the State University of New York at Binghamton besmirched by a basketball scandal in recent months, Lois DeFleur is taking some subtle steps to answer critics and, perhaps, shore up her legacy.
DeFleur announced in January that she’ll retire in July, and the rocky past few months at Binghamton have appended a troubling coda to what many regard as an otherwise successful presidency. A scandal in Binghamton’s men’s basketball program came with high doses of nearly every undesirable element one could imagine: Charges of off-court drug use by players, claims of heavy pressure by coaches to admit unqualified students, and allegations that an athletics fund raiser was tarted up as a sexual “plaything” for donors.