The Penn State Scandal

The story from Pennsylvania State University is depressing for me to contemplate. Here is one of the most prestigious universities in the nation, a small-time land-grant research college set up in the middle of nowhere that has since become a noted center of serious higher education, embroiled in a child molestation scandal involving its football team. People see the abuse take place but report it only to each other in an apparent effort to cover it up and keep everything look like business as usual on the surface.

But that's just it. It was business as usual. No one in the Penn State athletics department communicated with anyone on the outside and no one challenged each other to report the abuses to the authorities, thanks to a time-honored code of silence. Head coach Joe Paterno could have saved himself a lot of trouble - and his job - if he'd reported Jerry Sandusky's crimes to the police.  He could have ignored he fact that he was required to only tell the head of his department and gone over a head or two to do something more about it. He could have been the hero the students who actually rioted in support of him thought he was. A hero, of course, is someone who does the right thing and doesn't give a damn about the consequences. Joe Paterno is neither of those things.  Since when is genuine heroism being the one of the "winningest" (I hate that word) football coaches in the history of sports?

Penn State, despite having made the leap from its beginnings as a school for farming and mechanics to being an academic powerhouse, still ties its identity to its football team, so much that school pride revolves more around the team than the scholarship that gives the school its reason to exist. Intercollegiate athletics have always been something of an embarrassment to higher education in America, what with all the scandals involving inflated grades and bribes to ensure that the best athletes made the team, even if they weren't the best students . . . or even if they weren't legitimate students at all. And now this? I'm still trying to understand such a crime involving ten-year-old boys got started on a college campus in the first place.

If most of the students at Penn State are as educated as they should be, they will be contemplating and pondering just how the athletic program at Penn State got so much out of control and will be much less likely be party to the sham of the idea of intercollegiate athletics as a noble extension of any university's goal toward intellectual development. After all, the only thing the Penn State athletic program has extended is a kind of boorish boosterism, a celebration of a mindset that rewards "teamwork" and "success" rather than genuine thought.