Penn State fallout

A friend wrote tonight to say he was “spooked” by the events at Penn State. Me too. Not just what happened, or the cover-up, but the fact that the events could occur so brazenly in campus facilities, even in front of an eyewitness in at least two cases, and nothing was done about them until up to 9 years later.

Over the years I would root for Penn State against any team except Iowa. That goes way back to the mid-1970’s before I had spent even a day in State College. It’s just that I always liked Joe Paterno, appreciated the throwback uniforms of the Nittany lions, and thought it looked like Paterno was doing things the right way.

And my initial instinct was simply to assume that he must have done the correct reporting procedures for what he knew. But when you read the available documentation, that just doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s hard to believe, but the uncrowned king of college sports integrity is now going down in what must be the worst scandal in U.S. college sports history.

What could possibly compare? Steroids? Point-shaving? Recruiting violations? Of course not. Systematic child rape on campus obviously tops them all.

Before now, the worst case I can think of is probably Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss trying to orchestrate a smear of his murdered player as a “drug dealer” in order to take heat off his own program. This situation is considerably worse, I would say.

That said, I’m sorry not to be able to agree with the claim of the victims’ lawyer that Penn State should have consulted the victims before firing Paterno. His concern is that everyone will now blame the victims for Paterno’s firing, so that the university put its own interests above those of the victims yet again.

I’m afraid I find the reasoning here a bit absurd. Because:

1. No one is going to blame the molested kids for the firing of Paterno. Even an insane Paterno fanatic wouldn’t blame the kids.

2. Universities have to make major personnel decisions as they see fit, not after consultation with outside interest groups, no matter the group.

3. Firing Paterno, sad though it was, seems to me the inevitable decision.

4. As for the complaint that the university did this “in its own interests”– well, what on earth do you expect a university Board of Trustees to do? Of course they need to protect the university legally here, faced with possibly millions of dollars in losses in justified lawsuits by victims. A Board of Trustees is, in fact, entrusted with protecting the reputation and long-term health of an academic institution. It’s true that there are times when you need to put justice and ethics above the institution’s immediate interest (which Curley, Shultz, Spanier, and Paterno failed to do). But I don’t see how firing Paterno genuinely hurts the victims. No one is going to blame them.

Two familiar phrases come to mind as a result of this scandal.

*You really can’t call anyone happy until they’re dead. (Herodotus/Sophocles) Paterno’s reputation is now permanently tarnished.

*It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up. If Paterno had pressed this incident to the maximum in 2002, no one would have held it against him that he was fooled by a sleazebag assistant coach for all those years. He’d have been doing what was right. Now, he *is* tarnished to some degree by association with Sandusky.

And by the way, I’m not convinced that Sandusky should be out on any kind of bail right now.