If you’ve seen Binghamton University in the news this past week, odds are it wasn’t for anything positive. We’ve become the butt of so many bad jokes that it’s hard to keep track, and everyone from Sports Illustrated to schools halfway across the country has an opinion.

What’s incredibly ironic is that the people who should have the most to say, BU’s administrators, are silent.

The University released one short statement last Thursday, stating that they had had “limited opportunity to examine” the 99-page report but were “already working on some of the report’s major findings.” A week later, there’s still no follow-up response, and President Lois DeFleur is in hiding. If the rest of the country has managed to find an opportunity to look at the audit, shouldn’t our administrators have squeezed it into their busy schedules as well? It does, after all, concern them a little.

And if major problems are being taken care of, why is the president, arguably the biggest of those problems, still allowed to comfortably retire? It’s no longer conjecture that this woman and her D-I dreams are responsible for the mess we’re in — in fact, it’s supported by 99 pages of data. Now she wants to go and shuffle the problems off onto a new president, or even worse, an interim one.

This scandal hasn’t just cast doubt on one aspect of our school; it has made it impossible to believe in the administration as a whole. If they allowed themselves to be bullied into turning a blind eye to the actions of higher-ups, how can we trust they’ll make the right decision the next time a difficult situation arises? The selection of our next president can determine the course of this school for decades to come, and as of right now, we’re relying on the type of process that will only leave us in the dark once again (see Page 1).

If the administration has its way, our school’s new leader will be chosen behind closed doors and mounds of red tape. But that’s not how it should be.

In the past, we have given the athletic department and administration the benefit of the doubt. As thanks, they betrayed our trust again and again. If BU is to recover from this scandal and earn back its good reputation, that can’t happen again. The system needs to be restructured so such a situation can’t occur, and part of that means transparency in the selection of our next president. People like Cheryl Brown and Brian Hazlett of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, who have proved they hold the integrity of our school above athletic fame, could make good additions to the team.

In the coming weeks we will demand a lot more of this University’s administration, and rightfully so; with the embarrassment that anyone connected to BU is feeling, we deserve it. Luckily, our first request is a simple one.

For all the above reasons and more, we demand an apology. Honestly, it’s ridiculous that we even have to ask.