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02 July 2010
MORGANTOWN - Former West Virginia University president Mike Garrison has had time to reflect on his brief term at the school and the perceived heavy-handed way some feel he performed his duties.
The partner at Spillman, Thomas & Battle - the law firm where he was employed before taking the WVU position in September 2007 and where he returned in September 2008 after resigning his post that June - said his term may have been mischaracterized.
He's not ready to go into detail about the controversial time he spent in Morgantown.
Then again, Garrison says, it's a good idea to retell his story, although he's not sure in what form.
"I do have the bug," he said to the Daily Mail in what he presented as his first interview on his presidency as it relates to athletics.
"I've spent some time collecting my thoughts and my notes on the matter. I never say, 'Never.' I think it's important. I do think it's important.
"I think it's important that people understand that in this day of new media - quick media, blog media, comments-at-the-end-of-a-story media - that people understand the entirety of the story. Usually what you see is the tip of the iceberg. The rest is under water."
Garrison still gets quizzed about buyouts and contracts and things he became associated with as WVU battled its former football coach, Rich Rodriguez.
"I actually get calls in the sports media world saying, 'We'd like to retell this story,' " Garrison said.
He always declines. Not once, he says, has he given an interview on his time in office since he left the university in September 2008.
But in February C. Peter Magrath, who succeeded Garrison on an interim basis, wrote an article that was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education on his time spent in Garrison's wake.
Garrison disagreed with some of Magrath's opinions and representations, calling the piece "baseless" and "intellectually just completely dishonest."
"I read it," he said. "I had to read it twice because it was, historically, a re-write of history."
Then, in May, an article appeared in the Daily Mail explaining a clause in the contract of men's basketball Coach Bob Huggins. He is to be paid the "mean" salary among Big East coaches, and even Garrison, who constructed the contract along with his general counsel, Alex Macia, and Huggins and his agent, Richard Katz, admits it's a rarity.
What stood out to Garrison was how WVU officials said they couldn't speculate on the reason for the clause since the previous administration was responsible.
That day something clicked within Garrison, who believes he was unfairly perceived as "heavy-handed" and a "micromanager" when he served as president.
He said he felt compelled to explain not only the purpose of the clause, but also the process of creating and including it.
It was a small part of a larger idea. He said a revisiting of history might cause many to reassess his term, even though it ended because of the Heather Bresch eMBA scandal, which he concedes was a "glaring issue."
"When the Rodriguez (lawsuit) started, there were 4-to-1 people saying, 'This is terrible; it's awful,'" he said. "Now I think with people - and they'll stop me on the street when they see me now - people say, 'Thank you so much for standing up for that.'
"When it started, people were just against it. They thought it was awful. Nobody wants to see bad, negative things about the university."
As for Huggins' contract, Garrison strongly contests the suggestion that he and his chief of staff, Craig Walker, excluded the athletic department. He also remembers people saying a lifetime deal was a bad idea. Nothing like it had been done at WVU.
"It's very interesting now to run into folks who at the time said I was just doing this for my own personal reasons," Garrison said. "I had a lot of people saying I was giving the farm away. I didn't hear many people saying that this year."
Garrison concedes he was deeply involved in athletics, but he says conditions he inherited upon his entry into office forced him to be.
Garrison was named president in April 2007 and discovered later Rodriguez had not signed the contract he had agreed to the previous December. Macia then asked aloud one day if anyone had seen a contract signed by Huggins, who was hired in April. No one had.
