The University of Maryland doesn’t care about you.

It doesn’t care about its alumni who want to see their beloved alma mater at its best. It doesn’t care about public perception, as it so monstrously demonstrated Tuesday. And most disgracefully, it doesn’t care about its student athletes, especially the one who died a senseless death due to an institutional failure leading right to the president’s office.

On Monday, Maryland’s board of regents elected to reinstate suspended head coach D.J. Durkin and retain Athletic Director Damon Evans after a lengthy investigation into the death of UMD football player Jordan McNair. It also announced that Maryland President Wallace Loh will retire and leave the university in June.

As a proud UMD graduate, I find this an absolute embarrassment. It’s a slap in the face to the entire UMD community, most of whom balked at the idea of Durkin returning to coach a team he proved incapable of leading. Most shamefully, it’s an insult to McNair’s legacy. The least the university could do was use his death as the catalyst for change, and somehow it even bungled that simple task.

For those who haven’t been following this story, McNair collapsed from heatstroke during a team workout on May 29 and died 15 days later. In August, ESPN released a report citing a “toxic culture” in Maryland’s football program that implicated, among others, Durkin and Maryland strength coach Rick Court.

On Oct. 25, the university’s external investigation into McNair’s death and ESPN’s allegations “found that the Maryland football team did not have a ‘toxic culture,’ but it did have a culture where problems festered because too many players feared speaking out,” according to the report.

That was a strange conclusion, as the report cites incidents perpetrated by Court that any rational person would categorize as “toxic.” That included launching homophobic slurs at players, throwing food and weights at them, and on one occasion hurling a trash can full of vomit at student athletes. On what planet does that behavior not deserve a “toxic” label?

I’m on record as saying around the time of the initial ESPN report that Maryland should have canceled its season as a form of self-imposed atonement. In retrospect, that take might have been a tad hyperbolic. But at least it would have been the university accepting some responsibility for the football environment that led to McNair’s death.

Instead, the board of regents did what I feared it would by using the external report’s findings as an excuse to justify keeping Durkin and Evans employed. I had tickets to Saturday’s game in College Park against Michigan State. I will not be attending another Maryland football game with Durkin at the helm of this program.

Whether Durkin is a good person or not isn’t relevant. It doesn’t even matter whether Durkin directly or inadvertently fostered an atmosphere that allowed Court to terrorize his players. That it happened under Durkin’s watch at all should be enough to warrant his termination. He’s at best a bad leader, and at worst an active participant in the death of a young man left in his charge.

Keeping Evans around is slightly more defensible, but it still seems like it would have been more prudent to clean house. Who knows what Evans was aware of or not, but in this case ignorance of the situation is just as damning as knowledge. Either way, it shows a lack of top-down attentiveness and speaks to a dangerous lackadaisical attitude throughout his department.

The Loh situation is the most complicated, as the Washington Post reported that Loh was all for firing Durkin, but the board of regents wouldn’t budge and even threated to fire him if he stood by that position. It seems like they gave him the option of retirement if he didn’t get on board with their decision to reinstate Durkin.

Loh took a commendable stance on what to do with Durkin, and he even accepted “legal and moral” responsibility for McNair’s death shortly after the ESPN report went live. He also in 2017 nixed a proposal to revamp UMD’s sports medicine policies, a decision that potentially cost McNair his life when the football team’s trainers failed to give him proper medical attention.

I’m of the opinion that, like Evans, Loh had to go to scrub UMD of those potentially culpable in this tragedy and truly begin the healing process. Allowing Loh to retire in June instead of firing him or forcing him to resign arguably gives him too much agency in his exit, but it also ensured the entire university’s operations wouldn’t be disrupted so early in the school year.

If you don’t care about my thoughts on this matter, maybe the reactions of McNair’s parents to the news of Durkin’s reinstatement will be of interest.

"I feel like I've been punched in the stomach, and somebody spit in my face," his father Marty McNair said at a press conference following the announcement.

His mother Tonya Wilson expressed a similar sentiment at the same press conference: "I miss my son every day. And today, it just didn't help."

No one else’s opinion on this decision holds as much weight as theirs. They are both clearly horrified at the idea of Durkin coaching impressionable student athletes again, as should every person with a vested interest in UMD or just anyone with a heart and brain.

By choosing not to honor McNair’s legacy in any tangible way, Maryland has failed him, his parents and everyone who holds the school dear.

Joshua Axelrod (@jaxel222) is a graduate student in Media and Strategic Communications at George Washington University. Previously he was a web producer and pop politics writer for the Washington Examiner.