How Ohio State’s new president handled sexual misconduct scandals at the Naval Academy

Watch NBC4’s one-on-one interview with Ohio State President Ted Carter in the video player above.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Ted Carter has stepped into the presidency at Ohio State University during the turning point in a six-year legal battle about decades of sexual abuse complaints against a former university doctor.

Five cases brought against Ohio State by more than 200 former students who were sexually abused by Dr. Richard Strauss are approaching discovery. Despite years of the university’s efforts to quash the complaints, which accuse Ohio State of failing to address and prevent Strauss’ abuse, depositions will likely begin in the coming months.

Carter, who started Jan. 1, has ample experience navigating a school through the optics of a sexual assault scandal. While superintendent of the Naval Academy, the U.S. military academies came under congressional scrutiny for increasing rates of sexual assaults reported on their campuses. Carter testified at least twice before Congress about sexual assault, alongside the other military academy superintendents.

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And at the Naval Academy, teachers accused and convicted of sexual misconduct with students before Carter’s time made national headlines while he was superintendent – as did the academy’s apparent flaws in how it evaluated potential staff and reported sexual assault cases to the federal government.

The Naval Academy, like the other military academies, has had high rates of reported sexual assault since the federal government began requiring the academies to annually disclose such information. When Carter testified before U.S. representatives in 2017, sexual assault rates at the academy had doubled in four years. When he testified again in 2019, rates continued to climb.

“I committed myself to trying to improve in this,” Carter told Congress in 2019. “I am frustrated, and I think that we can’t educate our way out of it, we can’t train our way out of it. The accountability piece is what is going to move the needle on this, and I’m committed to getting that part better and more right.”

By the end of the year, Carter would step down as superintendent due to reaching 38 years in the Navy, after which he was required by law to retire.

Three years before Carter’s retirement, a Marine and former Naval Academy teacher’s sexual misconduct trial revealed that another teacher at the academy had been accused of inappropriate sexual contact with a female midshipman before he was hired to teach.

The Naval Academy teacher in question, Maj. Michael Pretus, was accused by a student of having sex with her while he was visiting the academy, years before he was hired. It is a crime for Marines to have sex with midshipmen, even if the encounter is consensual.

While the Marines investigated Pretus before the Naval Academy hired him, the academy admitted to the Washington Post in 2016 that it was not aware of the allegation against Pretus until the Post reported it.

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The Washington Post found that of the military academies, the Naval Academy had the highest rates of sexual misconduct accusations against faculty and staff. The Post also found several errors in the Naval Academy’s tallying of sexual misconduct complaints and investigations, including the fact that a case regarding Maj. Mark Thompson, who was convicted in 2013 of having sex with two female midshipmen while teaching at the Naval Academy, was absent from the reports.

The Naval Academy at the time blamed human error, not systemic issues with how the school vetted prospective staff or documented sexual misconduct. Still, Carter implemented reforms, including changes to the background check process for potential hires and moving the location for students to report sexual assault to a less conspicuous location on campus.

To combat sexual violence at the academy more generally, Carter also oversaw changes to the sexual violence prevention education midshipmen received, with a particular focus on addressing assaults involving alcohol. An academy program implemented under Carter involved the safe consumption of alcohol in a controlled environment to demonstrate responsible use to midshipmen.

What Carter said in an interview made the biggest difference, in his eyes, was seeking more input from the students as to their experiences of sexual misconduct.

“The one thing we did do in this space that I think is changing the landscape of how this is looked at across all universities is our level of transparency, the amount of surveys we did,” Carter said. “Nobody in this country was asking the questions of their students to find real answers.”

Like the Naval Academy, Ohio State faces high numbers of sexual assault complaints compared to its peers. Ohio State routinely has the highest rates of reported sexual assault among universities in the Big Ten, according to an analysis of Clery Act crime reports.

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By the time Ohio State announced Carter as its next president this past August, he had, expectedly, been briefed on the lawsuits against the university related to Strauss.

Strauss sexually assaulted and harassed hundreds of students, nearly all men, while a varsity team sports doctor and student health center physician from 1978-98. An independent investigation completed in 2019 found Strauss, who died by suicide in 2005, abused at least 177 students, and that university officials were aware of complaints as early as 1979.

The university is now fighting the admission of all materials related to that investigation as evidence in the lawsuits against it, arguing it amounted to hearsay. Ohio State’s attorneys have argued in court filings the university never accepted the findings of the investigation, but rather was “simply being transparent” when it published the investigation report on its website and emailed the report’s conclusions to students and staff.

Like Ohio State presidents before him, when asked about the Strauss-related lawsuits, Carter has apologized for the sexual abuse survivors endured while maintaining that the university is a fundamentally different institution now than it was during Strauss’ tenure.

The university has better reporting processes, sexual assault prevention trainings, and investigation protocols than it did decades ago. The leaders who survivors say failed them are no longer at the university, and many of them are aging or dead.

“When it comes to the survivors of Dr. Strauss – and again, it’s something that happened decades ago – my understanding is there’s still a lot of litigation going on,” Carter said in an interview. “I have publicly apologized to those survivors, and I feel so badly for the events that happened. But what I can say is this university is not the same as it was when those events happened.”

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