The Penn State board of trustees did the right thing yesterday in dismissing legendary football coach Joe Paterno, who failed to report to law enforcement authorities the rape of a boy in the Nittany Lions' shower that a graduate assistant had reported to him in 2002. (He did report it to his superior after waiting a day, then dropped the matter.)
The trustees were also right to dismiss University President Graham B. Spanier for his own appalling response to the indictment of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on charges of raping multiple underprivileged boys he was supposed to be helping. Here's what the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday:
On Sunday morning, Spanier in a statement announced his unconditional support of Senior Vice President Gary Schultz and Athletic Director Tim Curley, who have both been charged lying to a grand jury in the case.
"I have complete confidence in how they handled the allegations about a former university employee," Spanier said. Late that night, however, following a private meeting of the trustees, both men stepped down.
That howlingly inappropriate circle-the-wagons instinct has now rightfully cost Spanier his job. Meanwhile, WaPo's Dave Sheinin reports that "Paterno also took the extraordinary step of acknowledging his regret for not doing more to stop the abuse." Excuse me, but how is that extraordinary? If any of the guys who knew about the incident in 2002 — including the former graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, now the school's wide receivers coach, who witnessed the rape — had reported it to authorities at the time, the later rapes of other boys could have been prevented.
As Maureen Dowd wrote on Tuesday in NYT:
Like the Roman Catholic Church, Penn State is an arrogant institution hiding behind its mystique. And sports, as my former fellow sports columnist at The Washington Star, David Israel, says, is “an insular world that protects its own, and operates outside of societal norms as long as victories and cash continue to flow bountifully.” Penn State rakes in $70 million a year from its football program.
Some Penn State fans were reportedly pulling down lamp posts last night in the State College village of Happy Valley — not to express their outrage at university officials having spent years facilitating child rape by looking the other way, but to express their outrage that coach Paterno wasn't even being allowed to finish out his 46th season. That illustrates the distorted perspective that helped the crimes to continue for so long. It wasn't just a handful of athletic officials, but the community they served, whose priorities were skewed. Thank goodness Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly did her job.
Sandusky set up a charity to help underprivileged youth, and then used it as a stable for sex with them. The sooner the denizens of Happy Valley confront the depravity of such behavior and the unacceptable failure by Penn State personnel to stop it and report it to authorities, the sooner they can begin to repair the damage this disturbing case has done to their school. At least some in that community last night had the presence of mind to urge their friends and neighbors not to riot. Hey, you have to start somewhere.
Lest you think this grim story contrasts with a more uplifting western tradition of valuing and protecting children, I point you to the late John Boswell's book, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance.
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