360º: The Background
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
By now we know all of the facts. Two freshmen on the Providence College men’s basketball team were arrested and charged with assault last month after what school officials say was an unprovoked attack on a fellow student. Johnnie Lacy and James Still are the accused. Yerkin Abdrakhmanov was the unfortunate victim who was hospitalized with a broken nose and eye socket, and many other lacerations. The question is: why? Why would Lacy and Still do such a thing? We may never know the answer to that question, which is irrelevant. There is no acceptable answer for committing such a senseless act. But could it have been prevented?
Keno Davis is the head coach and face of the men’s basketball program at PC and this incident does not bode well for him. These were his recruits, not holdovers from the previous coaching staff. And while Davis and his staff cannot supervise their players around the clock, there will be some who criticize the coach for not instilling enough discipline in his players or at least the fear of God should they do something so foolish.
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But what about the school? Could they have done a better job of preventing something like this from happening? Providence College is a private Catholic institution with a total enrollment of about 5,300 students. Of that 5,300, 90 are of African-American descent. That’s 1.7%. The number of African-American male students is only 39.
As recently as 2007, a study by the U.S. Department of Education revealed that 13.1% of all college students were black. Clearly a big discrepancy.
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