Former UK president David Roselle, known for leading through athletics scandal, dies at 84

David Roselle, former University of Kentucky president who cleaned house in a scandal-ridden UK Athletics department and paid a high price for it, died Monday, his son said.

He was 84. Roselle was the ninth president from 1987 to 1990, tasked with continuing former President John Oswald’s task of turning UK from an agricultural college to a respected academic university. Roselle is most known for leading the university through a rule-breaking athletics scandal in the late 1980s, pushing for an investigation and hiring a judge to conduct a thorough internal investigation of the department.

Roselle hired Rick Pitino, beginning a new era of UK basketball. However, his involvement turned many, including Gov. Wallace Wilkinson, against him.

“What I did I wouldn’t change any of it,” Roselle told the Herald-Leader in 2012. “Nonetheless, it was controversial.”

In 1990 he left UK to become president of the University of Delaware, where he remained until retiring in 2007. A dorm on UK’s campus is named after him.

“Without David Roselle, the university’s integrity would have been compromised and the basketball program’s reputation irreparably damaged,” Herald-Leader sports columnist Billy Reed wrote in 1996. “Roselle was the UK president who stood tall during the NCAA investigation of Coach Eddie Sutton’s program, who demanded that the truth be pursued no matter what the cost, who didn’t flinch in the face of pressure from a bunch of wrong-thinking power brokers and influence peddlers. Sadly, Roselle’s rigid posture cost him his job.”

Roselle was a long-time mathematics professor before moving to the administrative side of universities. He had degrees from West Chester State College and Duke University.

Roselle is survived by a large family, including his wife, Louise and their two children. Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced.

Roselle’s son Arthur said his father loved his time at UK and despite what happened with the athletics department, Roselle left on good terms. Arthur said his dad was thoughtful, calm and considerate in everything he did.

“We have awesome memories from when I was little and he was a math professor, all the way up to when he was running a big institution,” Roselle said. “The time pressures of that are very different, and he found time to be just a fantastic family man.”

Arthur Roselle said that his parents loved Lexington, and still kept in contact with friends from UK until his father’s death. While David Roselle took heat during the athletics investigation, his son said hindsight has shown that he was the right one to tackle things head-on. As a sports fan, Roselle was committed to making sure the university properly investigated wrongdoing, his son said.

“I think in hindsight, people thought that they really did have the right person for the situation because he appreciated that it’s an academic institution, and having integrity, but he also appreciated that the sports side of UK is really important to people, and you have to get that right and you have to support it,” Arthur Roselle said.

Despite only spending a few years at UK, Arthur said his time there “cast a bigger shadow than that.

“He cast a big shadow on UK, and the university made a big difference to him and his career. It sort of defined who he was in a lot of ways, even though he spent a long time at Delaware afterwards,” Roselle said.

UK President Eli Capilouto issued a statement Monday, saying he was “saddened to hear of the passing of David Roselle.”

”He was an outstanding leader in higher education for several decades and had a profoundly important and positive impact on the University of Kentucky,” UK President Eli Capilouto said in a statement.

Capilouto reflected on spending time with Roselle when the dorm on campus was named in his honor. Capilouto said Roselle “was gracious and giving, with a quick wit and what was obviously a keen understanding of higher education as an incredibly successful academic administrator.”

“His tenure at UK in the late 1980s was marked by innovations in technology, the growth of our institution as a nationally recognized research institution and a steadfast commitment to integrity in all aspects of our university, even in the face at times of withering criticism,” Capilouto said. “He never wavered in his belief in the mission of institutions like ours and the importance of always doing things the right way. My thoughts are with his family and all those impacted by the life of President David Roselle.”

UK Athletics scandal

The scandal erupted in 1988, when the Los Angeles Daily News reported that a package had been sent from the UK basketball office to the home of recruit Chris Mills, containing $1,000. Doing so broke NCAA recruiting rules.

Traditionally, university presidents cooperate with NCAA investigations but had not pushed further. Roselle, however, hired a former judge, James Park, to lead the investigation. The instructions from Roselle to Park pushed for transparency: “If it’s out there, find it.”

Park’s investigation uncovered many other serious violations. UK’s report to the NCAA was large: nine heavy-duty binders, each containing as many as 837 pages of detail, former Herald-Leader editor John Carroll wrote in 2013. The university avoided the “death penalty” from the NCAA, but basketball coach Eddie Sutton and athletics director Cliff Hagen both resigned. Rick Pitino was then hired.

Despite the fact that so much of his time as president was taken up with atheltics, he was seen as someone who put the university’s academic needs at the forefront. John Ed Pearce, a columnist for the Courier-Journal, wrote that Roselle quickly earned respect on campus, making a positive impression among professors.

“He surprised and delighted faculty members by dropping in on classrooms, talking not just to deans and department heads but also to individual professors and staff members,” Pearce wrote. “It is a measure of the man that within months his former critics were hailing him as ‘the best thing to happen to the university in half a century.’”