Georgetown Basketball Coach John Thompson Resigns

WASHINGTON — Georgetown University  Coach John Thompson ended a 27-year career on Jan. 8, saying he could no longer juggle the demands of his personal life and those of running a nationally renowned basketball program.
"Basketball is 24-hour job, a seven-day-a-week job," Thompson says. "I do not have the ability at this time to address those things in my personal life and to do my job."
Thompson strongly disputed rumors that he would be moving on to the NBA to coach the Los Angeles Clippers. The stunning resignation comes about midway through a college basketball season that has seen the Hoyas struggle to an 0-4 record in the Big East Conference and a 7-6 overall record.
Thompson declined to be specific about his future, but repeated several times that he had been neglecting his personal life. He says he wasn't retiring from basketball and won't rule out a return to coaching at some point. He also says he expects to remain at the university.
Thompson is known for his opinions as much as he is for his on-court success. In January 1989, Thompson gained attention for his views on athletics and education when he walked off the floor before a home game against Boston College in protest of NCAA legislation, known as Proposition 42, that tightened criteria under which students could receive athletic scholarships.  He also did not coach the next game, on the road against Providence.
Georgetown University officials immediately named Craig Esherick, an assistant under Thompson for the last 16 years, as the new coach and said he would be signed to a long-term contract.

BOSTON — A judge threw out a libel suit late filed against a student journalist by a Wellesley College African studies professor who stirred controversy by claiming Jewish influence on the media led to negative publicity for him.
In a ruling made public on New Year's Eve, Superior Court Judge Judith Fabricant dismissed the case brought by Wellesley professor Anthony Martin over a 1993 article by Avik Roy. Martin — who had been the center of a school controversy when he accused Wellesley of participating in a "Jewish attack on Black progress" — sued Roy in 1993 after Roy's story appeared in the student-run magazine Counterpoint.
The story focused on an encounter between Martin and a Wellesley student who accused the professor of verbally assaulting her, using foul language. In his story, which relied on unidentified sources, Roy alleged that the college tried to keep the complaint quiet and tried to stop the college's newspaper from printing interviews with Martin and the student.
But only one paragraph was deemed libelous by Martin: one that suggested the professor was given tenure at Wellesley after he sued the school for race discrimination. In fact, Martin had received tenure before he sued the college over a merit increase.
Fabricant ruled that, although the paragraph contained the error, the story was "substantially true." She also ruled that Martin didn't suffer any harm to his reputation.
Martin, a professor of Africana studies, became the center of a heated controversy on the campus in 1992 when he assigned his students a Nation of Islam-published book called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews that argued Jewish people were deeply involved in the slave trade. Dozens of Wellesley students and alumnae protested the use of the book which they called anti-Semitic.
Martin responded in December 1993 by publishing his own pamphlets and eventually a book called The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, which said Jewish influence on the media led to negative publicity for him. Roy himself is not Jewish.
"For 25 years I have taught the Christian involvement in the slave trade and nobody made a fuss," said Martin in an interview with Black Issues in 1993. "As soon as questions of the Jewish involvement arise, it's anti-Semitism and all kinds of madness. The basic question is whether there was Jewish involvement, and if there was, why are they so uptight about this information getting out?"