Northern Kentucky University Athletic Director Dismissed For Affairs With Four Staffers, One Student

More athletic directors in the news! Northern Kentucky University dismissed Scott Eaton, once an athletic administrator at Brown and a member of the NKU department since 1998, for undisclosed reasons in early March. As we learned late yesterday, Eaton was guilty of "inappropriate, intimate relationships with four University employees, including two women whom he supervised," as well as an affair with a student in a class he taught. Five inappropriate and intimate relationships in all, uncovered by an independent investigation commissioned "after university officials heard rumors of possible misconduct."

As recently as Thursday, The Northerner, a Northern Kentucky student newspaper, was lamenting the lack of new information on Eaton's mysterious firing and noting that his personnel evaluations offered no hints:

NKU did release personnel evaluations for Scott Eaton from 2009 until his termination, which provided no information relating to ethical misconduct, but talked highly of the director who received average and above average scores from his supervisor.

This is North Kentucky's first year competing as a Division-I school, officially a member of the Atlantic Sun as of the end of its 2012 seasons. The escape from Division II's Great Lakes Valley Conference is a fairly impressive accomplishment, spearheaded in part, one has to assume, by Eaton, and it's fun to watch the students interviewed for the local NBC affiliate's story consider the lessons in leadership offered by Eaton's misdeeds, which are described by WLWT as "the campus's best kept secret." Who would have thought that the nice guy in the picture up there would be capable of any impropriety?

NKU President: AD Fired Over Inappropriate Relationships With 5 Women [WLWT]