UC Berkeley Chancellor Dirks, Who Presided Over Cover-Up of Football Player Ted Agu’s Death, to Resign in 2017
Lawyers For Assailant in Germantown Academy Lawsuit Regarding Athlete-on-Athlete Abuse Threaten Muchnick a Second Time
August 16, 2016Will UC Berkeley Chancellor Dirks’ Resignation Spur Further Investigation of the Agu Football Death Cover-Up — Or Just Take the Wind Out of It?
August 18, 2016Nicholas Dirks, the embattled chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley, will resign in the coming months. After the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story yesterday, UC system president Janet Napolitano confirmed Dirks’ imminent departure.
The move comes less than a week before the publication of Concussion Inc.’s ebook THE TED AGU PAPERS: A Black Life That Mattered — And the Secret History of a Covered-Up Death in University of California Football. Details on pre-ordering the ebook from Amazon are below.
(The news coverage of the Dirks resignation did not mention the football scandal. And the truth is that Agu’s death and the cover-up of the abuses of football coach Sonny Dykes and his strength and conditioning assistant, Damon Harrington, while emblematic of the chancellor’s failures, are well down the list of the political pressures forcing yesterday’s move.)
‘The Ted Agu Papers: A Black Life That Mattered — And the Secret History of a Covered-Up Death in University of California Football’ To Be Published August 22
Concussion Inc. has set August 22 as the publication date for our seventh ebook, THE TED AGU PAPERS: A Black Life That Mattered — And the Secret History of a Covered-Up Death in University of California Football.
THE TED AGU PAPERS is available at http://amzn.to/2aA2LDl for $9.99. The ebook is readable on all devices supporting the Amazon Kindle platform. One hundred percent of the proceeds from sales are earmarked for donation to research and education for sickle cell trait. Charitable organizations interested in being designated for revenue from this project can contact [email protected].
Anchored by thousands of pages of never-before-published public records, plus several leaked documents, THE TED AGU PAPERS tells the story of how one of the world’s most prestigious universities lied about the cause of a student-athlete’s death, hid pertinent information about both the incident and Agu’s medical history, and deceived the public on the narrative and background — all to protect UC Berkeley’s billion-dollar commitment to success in college football.
Agu, a pre-med student at Cal and one of four children of Nigerian-born parents, was 21 years old when he collapsed multiple times and ultimately died in the early-morning darkness during a brutal offseason conditioning drill on a campus hillside on February 7, 2014. The Alameda County medical examiner initially found the cause of death to be generic heart failure, but later, in an extraordinary action based on discovery in the family’s wrongful death civil lawsuit against the university, amended the finding to include sickle cell anemia trait — of which Agu was a known carrier.
Ever since the $4.75 million civil settlement earlier this year, many documents from THE TED AGU PAPERS have been the subject of analysis at the Concussion Inc. website. The articles are linked below. But only in the ebook can readers access the complete file of primary-source records behind this investigation, which starts with an examination of the actions of Damon Harrington, the football strength and conditioning coach, and extends all the way up to UC Berkeley’s chancellor, Nicholas Dirks.
Concussion Inc. has never spoken with anyone from the Agu family. Neither they nor their attorneys participated in the production of THE TED AGU PAPERS.
For more information on author Irvin Muchnick and his three books — most recently CONCUSSION INC.: The End of Football As We Know It (ECW Press, 2015) — see the website, https://concussioninc.net. For information on Concussion Inc.’s six previous ebook titles, see https://concussioninc.net/?page_id=5578.
The launch of THE TED AGU PAPERS is scheduled while California Public Records Act requests for certain additional documents remain unresolved or in dispute. Notably, UC Berkeley has said that more records pertaining to an internal administrative review of football conditioning coach Harrington currently are being studied for possible exemptions from public disclosure. In addition, Concussion Inc. is contemplating state court litigation for release of a 2014 campus police report — never forwarded to the Alameda County district attorney, and reviewed by that office only this month, in response to our coverage — in which a former student-athlete reportedly accused Harrington, three months prior to Agu’s death, of inciting a criminal assault of one teammate by another.
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“Explainer: How ‘Insider’ Access Made San Francisco Chronicle and Berkeley J-School Miss Real Story Behind Death of Cal Football’s Ted Agu,” https://concussioninc.net/?p=10931
Complete headline links to our Ted Agu series:
https://concussioninc.net/?p=10877
Installments in “THE TED AGU PAPERS” series:
https://concussioninc.net/?p=10992
https://concussioninc.net/?p=10996
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11014
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11087
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11096
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11099