Is this Indiana's defining moment?

By ALINE MENDELSOHN

© St. Petersburg Times, published September 17, 2000

SUNDAY

The phone rang.

"Hello?"

"They fired him!" my mother announced. No "Hello," no "Hi, sweetie," no "How are you?" Just "They fired him!"

She didn't have to say who she meant by "they" or "him." The Indiana University administration had been waiting for months for Bob Knight to self-destruct, and he had. Warned that IU would no longer put up with a basketball coach who choked players and raged at staff members, Knight nonetheless grabbed and berated a freshman who had the temerity to say, "Hey, what's up, Knight?" And now president Myles Brand had fired him. Mom called as soon as the news flashed across CNN.com.

I headed to 120 Ernie Pyle Hall, home of the campus newspaper, Indiana Daily Student. Soon I was dispatched to Nick's, a dimly lit Bloomington sports bar bursting with cream and crimson memorabilia. On the first floor hangs a framed photo of Knight throwing a chair with the caption, "Bobby Knight offering a little old lady his chair." The second floor boasts 1980s front pages screaming "We're #1," "Bedlam Hits Bloomington," and my personal favorite, "Hoosiers -- NCAA Champs" splashed over the lesser news of the day, "Reagan's condition "excellent' after surgeries remove bullet."

Nick's patrons didn't care for Brand's decision, and they didn't hesitate to pepper their comments with four-letter words.

I had just returned to the newsroom, ready to write, when a sophomore screeched: "There are hundreds of people marching through campus heading to President Brand's house!"

Along with other staffers, I grabbed my notebook and met throngs of marchers outside. As we tramped through the muddy grass, still soaked from the morning's thunderstorms, I threw out some questions. People were way too eager to be quoted.

"Everyone was coming, so I just wanted to see what it was like," said my first interviewee, a freshman. She quickly added: "I mean, I like Knight and all."

"Coach is the reason I came to IU," another freshman told me. "How can they do this to us?"

Hundreds of students gathered on Brand's lawn, holding poster board signs and handbills: "Brand Must Burn" and "Wanted Dead or Alive: Kent Harvey." Harvey is the freshman Knight grabbed and lectured.

"Hey, hey, ho, ho, Myles Brand has got to go!" shouted the protesters, some shaking with rage, others simply enjoying the rare opportunity to express indignation.

The ringleader, invisible behind the crowd, riled them through a megaphone, his words warping and coming apart like those of Charlie Brown's schoolteacher. After his spiel, the herds flocked to Assembly Hall and I returned to the newsroom. As I wrote, the police scanner blared, advising us of conflict and arrests.

In previous breaking news events, the newsroom usually had been united, especially when there was a clear good guy and bad guy. This story, however, split the staff. We all thought Knight's dismissal was outrageous, though for different reasons. One side pouted that Knight had been wronged. The other wondered why he had lasted this long. (When it came to the coach, Brand had a five-strikes-you're-out policy.)

MONDAY

Showalter Fountain, a statue of a woman surrounded by six dolphins, is a fixture in the heart of campus. Legend has it that when a virgin graduates from IU, the dolphins will jump out of the fountain.

Now I know what it really takes to get the dolphins out. As I walked to class this morning, I paged through the Daily Student and saw a picture of protesters uprooting the 1,500-pound mammals. Around midnight the night before, a handful of students had knocked down signs, burned life-size effigies of Brand and wrecked the fountain, all in the name of school spirit.

It was official: We were the laughingstock of the country.

All day, the campus buzzed. One student had seen the rioting and immediately thought a minority student had been shot -- why else would people be so upset? A graduate student from India read the newspaper and sneered: "You call this a riot?"

From what I heard, the riot -- or whatever it was -- had resembled nothing so much as a lewd fraternity party. Amid battle cries to save their general, drunken students yelled, "We want beer!" "Die Harvey Die" and "Kill Kent." (This, apparently, is the new IU version of freshman orientation.) One student told me the protesters asked women to support Knight by flashing their breasts, though those weren't the words the protesters used.

The landscapers will soon restore the flowers, but our credibility and reputation will take longer to repair.

As it is, my school doesn't have a stellar history of positive publicity. Each of my four years has been marked by a disaster that brought out the TV satellite trucks:

n Freshman year, fall 1997: A fraternity is caught planning a racist scavenger hunt, in which participants are asked to bring back items such as "Any funny-looking Mexican (Blacksican, extra credit)."

n Sophomore year, winter 1998: A student dies after a night of heavy drinking.

n Junior year, summer 1999: A white supremacist and former IU student goes on a shooting spree and kills a Korean student outside his church, less than a block from campus.

And now this.

Though most students continued about their business, at least one senior boycotted class in protest of the firing. Another protester observed a self-imposed a day of silence, communicating with Post-It Notes and with the help of his roommate, who introduced him as "Idiot." The events led to heated class discussions and some unwelcome intrusions. I was in journalism ethics class when a man knocked at the door. He introduced himself as a talking head from the TV news and told the professor, "I was wondering if I could tape your class and ask them a few questions."

Surreal. The class buzzed. Was this a gag? Did our prof set this up to give us a lesson?

"I didn't plan this," he assured us, then asked the reporter to come at the end of class. The irony of barging into a journalism ethics class apparently was lost on the talking head.

The student to my left turned to me and said, "Sometimes, I wonder why I majored in journalism."

TUESDAY

A student writing in the newspaper pointed out how trivial our little drama was. When our parents think of momentous events, they remember the Day JFK Was Shot, the Day MLK Jr. Was Shot and the Day Man Walked on the Moon.

Fabulous. Our defining moment is the Day the Administration Carried Out the Mission of the University. Where were you? I was on the phone with my mom.

Today I was assigned to cover a rally outside the famous bar, Nick's. I accepted the assignment despite the small worry of being trampled by the masses.

As it turned out, the event attracted 40 people, including the media. A radio producer from Chicago had planned it about six hours before; he managed to orchestrate brief spurts of chanting, "Hell, no, Knight won't go."

"Don't say "Knight,' " a student said. "Say "Coach Knight.' " Someone chimed in, "Hell, no, I want a T-shirt" and got a promotional radio station shirt. Passers-by picked up free stuff and took off.

A bearded man in a Volkswagen Rabbit rolled by. "Long live Kent Harvey!" he called out. The demonstrators responded in muffled obscenities. I skipped yoga for this?

Less than an hour later, it was over. The producer was a little disappointed, but as he said, at least he got the sound bites of students "protesting."

WEDNESDAY

In the late afternoon, the roar of news helicopters swirling above campus distracted me from a professor's explanation of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story. I was annoyed that I couldn't pay attention, that the helicopters were growing louder by the minute.

I wondered, is Bobby Knight above higher education? He is famous for benching players who cut class, so surely he doesn't condone the way this fiasco is interrupting our learning. Why do we bow down to celebrity? Last May, John Cougar Mellencamp delivered the commencement address, and what a treat that was, watching him spit out his gum and curse onstage.

After class, I headed to Dunn Meadow to hear Knight speak. I squinted in the sunlight. Thousands waited for his arrival, a handful perched in pine trees and several dozen atop the Sigma Chi fraternity house. The toothy TV reporters, waxy with stage makeup, swarmed the Meadow, promising "Live, late-breaking coverage!"

Normally, Dunn Meadow is the spot where college men bring their adorable golden retrievers so the women joggers will coo, "How cute!" Now it looked like a set from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with a row of white TV satellites lining the west side.

Knight's speech didn't provide any startling revelations. To his credit, he urged students to quit leaving death threats on Kent Harvey's voice mail; on the other hand, he couldn't resist insulting Harvey's stepfather. Knight didn't denounce the death threats that drove his most vocal critic, professor Murray Sperber, out of the country on unpaid leave. And the disciplinarian who wanted to teach the disrespectful Harvey a lesson never mentioned that it's disrespectful to vandalize.

Instead, he complained that the IU administration never wished him a fond farewell. He left on this note:

"I'd like each of you to take a minute, a full minute, to bow your heads, and in whatever way you do, wish myself and my family the very best, as I wish you the very best."

As I left, I saw a booth selling "Indiana University is Bob Knight" T-shirts.

"They're $20 each, but I'll give you one for $15 if you don't tell anyone," a woman told me.

"No, thanks," I said, but what I really wanted to say was that Indiana University is not Bob Knight. It's a place where students annually raise thousands at a fundraiser for childhood cancer. It's a place where students care passionately about important causes. There's a junior who served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and a senior who wears a bulletproof vest for her job at an abortion clinic. It's a place where on any given day, students are offered at least a half-dozen free activities: performances by the comedy troupe, recitals by the world-renowned School of Music and speeches about anything you could ever imagine.

If only we were famous for the right reasons.

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