How you do it

And now, the mea culpa.

Which experience tells us is usually pretty vague on the "mea", and avoids the "culpa" like it's radioactive.

Public entities, see, hardly ever cop to anything, because the suits take over and the suits are horrendously bad at public relations. The suits are worried about legal ramifications. The suits are worried about punitive damages. They see the trees, but they never see the forest, which is the long-term damage being disingenuous and weasel-y does to the credibility of said public entity.

In other words ... good for the University of Maryland.

Which yesterday did see the forest for the trees, clearly and in sharp relief, and did not insult the public's intelligence by pretending otherwise. Mistakes were not made at Maryland, to use the weasel words usually associated with the standard non-mea culpa mea culpa. Oh, no. In the death from heatstroke of Terrapins football player Jordan McNair, Maryland screwed up. And Maryland said so.

That was Wallace D. Loh, the university president, saying the university "accepts legal and moral responsibility" for the mistakes, both willful and otherwise, that led to McNair's death. Maryland, Loh said, broke the covenant every university makes with the parents of every student.

"They entrusted their son to us, and he did not return home," Loh said.

The suits, a lot of them, would probably cringe at that. They'd probably say it was a mistake for Maryland to take responsibility for its actions, because the family's suits will surely use it against the school when the lawsuit comes down. And maybe that's true.

But you know what?

Those are just the trees. It's the forest that matters.

It's probably too obvious to say, first of all, that the lawsuit was going to come down even if Loh had lapsed into customary Public Entity Weasel Mode. It will. It always does. And going Weasel Mode was not going to alter that an iota.

Here's what it would have altered: The public's perception of Maryland as an institution of higher learning that can be trusted.

Perhaps not every parent would react this way. But if this parent of a prospective student heard Maryland trot out the "Mistakes were made" dodge in the matter of a student death, this parent would no more send his child to Maryland than he would send him or her to the dark side of the moon.

This is because taking responsibility for the welfare of its students means something if you're a university that wants to maintain a reputation worth maintaining. It means damn near everything, in fact, because so much of that reputation is about trust. And if you forfeit that trust simply to cushion the blow from a lawsuit, how do you ever gain it back?

And in the long view, how is that not more important?