Kansas college president compared athlete to Hitler, ‘a great leader.’ She’s got to go

Deborah Fox, president of Highland Community College in Highland, Kansas, recently questioned the leadership of a Black football player at the school by comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

As a result, we don’t just question her leadership. Because there’s no question at all that she’s got to either resign or be fired by the college’s board of trustees.

Her remarks — not just insensitive, but insane — were made during an October meeting about racial issues within the program, with a former assistant football coach. Players had gathered to discuss what they saw as the harassment of Black student athletes.

The college president singled out one of the more vocal players as being too negative and in her mind wielding too much influence with other Black players on the team.

“You know leadership,” Fox said, according to a recording shared with us. “There’s certain people that emerge as leaders, good or bad. Even though we don’t like it, Hitler was a great leader.”

“He, somehow, even for evil, moved and were able to do these things. It’s terrifying. But that’s what can happen when leadership isn’t acknowledged and goes untapped or undirected.”

First: Huh? In what sense was Hitler a “great leader”?

And every kid who’s seen as a bad influence, correctly or not, is Hitler now?

She answered our questions about her remarks this way: “I am sickened and horrified that a discussion that included diversity and leadership was taken out of context and used in this manner and only a selected sentence of audio was shared.”

No, it wasn’t.

Fox became president of Highland in 2019, and allegations of racial discrimination in the football and women’s basketball programs soon followed.

“I was speaking on our responsibility as educators to direct leaders in a positive way,” Fox wrote to students, in trying to explain away her Hitler comparison. Some leadership styles are negative, she said. “Adolf Hilter was one of these examples. He is an example of someone able to influence in a negative way. We as a society may not like considering what he did as leadership, but unfortunately it was.”

“The statement that is being used in the recording is that Hilter was ‘a good leader and good or bad, we may not like it, but he was a leader.’ I followed up that statement speaking on how horrific Hilter’s crimes were.”

“I regret those words were selected and used in manner to harm others for their own personal gain,” Fox wrote. “I thought I was engaged in a professional conversation about growth and diversity and developing students in a positive way, this obviously was not the situation from the person(s) that made and shared this recording.”

You compared a student you think of as a bad influence to the genocidal maniac who tried to exterminate all Jews, Roma and gay people, and the problem is that someone shared the recording?

No, Deborah Fox, the problem is you. And after leaving your current job, for the good of Highland’s students, you owe it to yourself to enroll in some history courses that might help you understand why that’s the case.