The chairman had more to say, but boos and hisses drowned him out. “What was he thinking?” one trustee said to me later. “We are in an existential crisis here. Now is not the time for the Lou Anna Simon reputation rehabilitation tour.”

The moment was emblematic of a key dilemma currently facing MSU leaders: How can they show the public that university administrators accept responsibility for their handling of the Nassar situation, improve the school’s systems for handling sexual-abuse cases, and heal the university’s battered reputation in the eyes of students, faculty, and the public? Nassar, once a highly regarded physician at MSU and the official doctor for the USA women’s gymnastics team, admitted to sexually abusing young girls under the pretense of giving them medical treatment. Weeks earlier, Nassar received two prison sentences of up to 175 years, one from each county judge who heard testimony from survivors detailing his abuse during grueling witness-statement periods.

On several occasions beginning in 1997, his victims complained to various MSU officials and were ignored or silenced; a 2014 internal Title IX investigation prompted by one such complaint cleared Nassar, concluded that his treatments were “not of a sexual nature.” It turned out, though, that Nassar’s accuser only received an incomplete version of the investigators’ findings. Their full report, which was provided to MSU’s top lawyers, warned the university that Nassar’s conduct may both create liability for the school and cause “unnecessary trauma based on the possibility of perceived inappropriate sexual misconduct.” The full report didn’t come to light until January 2018.

Nassar molested several more patients before being fired by MSU in 2016 amid a flurry of criminal complaints and civil lawsuits filed by victims. Later that year, he was indicted in state court on dozens of charges of molesting patients and in federal court on child-porn possession charges. The NCAA is now among several entities investigating the university’s mishandling of the case. Last week, lawyers for Amanda Thomashow, whose 2014 complaint launched the Title IX investigation, demanded that MSU re-conduct that probe.

The position MSU is in has only one clear parallel: the recent sexual-abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University. In 2011, the school’s former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, was indicted on 52 counts of child molestation involving boys attending a football camp. That scandal was possibly “the worst reputational crisis among major institutions in American higher education,” wrote Jeff Hunt, the consultant hired in 2012 to help rehabilitate Penn State’s reputation, in his book, Brand Under Fire.

Hunt is now revising that assessment. Michigan State, he told me, “has a much bigger problem than Penn State.” While the underlying issues of mishandling sexual-abuse cases are similar, Penn State’s response to Sandusky’s indictment was dramatic and public. MSU’s leadership actively avoided public scrutiny for more than a year after Nassar’s first indictment in November 2016—and continued to do so several months after he pleaded guilty one year later.