[Culture]
[culture] The Ones Who Walk Away From Penn State
I don’t comment on sports much on this blog, with the exception of occasional posts about ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1){kind=small}
the_child
Part of this is because of the way I grew up. I spent the vast majority of my childhood overseas in the era prior to VCRs or consumer satellite television, so there were no broadcast sports in the house. My parents aren’t sports fans at either the college or pro level. Even the high school I went to was about as unfocused on sports as it’s possible for an American high school to be.
My first real encounter with serious sports fans was when I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin. Hook ‘em, Horns. Watching Longhorn fannery, and more specifically, Aggie fannery, rise nearly to the level of mental illness in some cases, pretty much confirmed my lack of interest in that culture.
On top of this, I experienced a childhood of always being the slowest kid in P.E. class, the most inept at ball sports, the last picked for every team or exercise (and often the subject of bitter arguments about who had to be stuck with me), all of this in the era when the gym teacher coaching style was to pick one kid to goat hard in order to motivate the rest. “You don’t want to be like Lake, do you!?” shouted with a sneer were words I heard from adult authority figures for many years of my life.
Likewise, my first experience of the concept of privilege in the social justice sense of the term was through athletic privilege. As early as about fifth grade, the bad kids — bullies, petty thieves, etc. — who happened to be good at sports were excused a great deal of terrible behavior that would have landed most kids in a lot of trouble. By the time of my high school years, this favoritism was blatant and explicit. For example, you could be thrown out of my prep school for drinking, unless you happened to be a sports star whose contributions to the team drew alumni interest and donations.
All of which is to say, my attitude toward college and pro sports hovers somewhere between blank indifference and resentful contempt. Which I recognize is specific to my life experience and personal quirks, so I don’t usually feel a need to comment on sports in public. Not for me to piss on other people’s harmless passions. With the exceptions of dodgy stadium deals and some unfortunate educational funding priorities, sports fans don’t really have a negative or destructive influence on public life. (Unlike, say, Evangelical Christians whose misplaced obsessions and passions frequently poison the well for everyone.)
Except sometimes sports does become destructive. Joe Paterno. Jerry Sandusky. Penn State. The Freeh Report. Even I, the resolute non sports fan, am aware of what’s been going on in State College, PA.
And I just don’t understand it.
How can devotion to a team, to a university, be so powerful that child rape can be excused and covered up and enabled to preserve that team’s fortunes and good name? Not just one incident of child rape once, but a pattern of behavior known to the principals for well over a decade?
What the fuck is wrong with people?
This business is like everything I’ve ever despised about the culture of sports in America distilled into one evil package.
Why aren’t Curley, Spanier and Schultz registered sex offenders rotting in prison? Why is there a single statue or plaque to Joe Paterno still left standing? Why does Penn State even still have a football program? This isn’t the case of a child molester who happens to be tangentially associated with a football program. This is a case of an entire sporting dynasty resting explicitly on a knowing long-term coverup of child rape. To preserve Penn State’s good name, and Joe Paterno’s place in history.
I don’t give a damn how many games he won. What a nice man he was. How many athletes he graduated. When he made the decision to protect Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno crossed an unforgivable line. When the officials of Penn State made the decision to protect Jerry Sandusky, they crossed an unforgivable line.
Will anyone walk away from Penn State over this?
I seriously doubt it. The culture of entitlement and privilege around big time sports in America is too powerful. Penn State’s need for alumni donations keyed to its football program is too great. What’s a few kids getting messed around back in the day compared to the significance of a Big Ten football program?
My question to all you Penn State supporters with ready excuses for Paterno and the school, with easy words about how it’s not the program’s fault and you shouldn’t punish the players or the institution by shutting things down, is this: How would you feel about the coverup if you were one of Jerry Sandusky’s victims? How would you feel about Penn State if your child had been abused by Sandusky under the smiling protection of Joe Paterno?
There couldn’t be a sports story with a more clear-cut moral than this. And I’m afraid it will have no effect at all.
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Posted: 5:54 am Mon July 16 2012 |
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Jay,
The Penn State nightmare is almost too evil to even contemplate. WHYY (NPR station)’s “Radio Times” talked about the Freeh report, and a woman called in saying Paterno was a football coach, not a policeman or whatever. It’s unbelievable. I do think, though, things will change. They’ll never change to the extent they should, but Penn State will be dealing with the consequences for decades to come. Other big sports universities will pay heed and change — not all of them. But we’ll see a change.
Jay,
As another person totally indifferent to organized sports (while a student, I attended exactly one half of one home football game, just so I could claim I went), here are my views.
Disclaimers: I got my degree at Penn State and I currently work for Penn State. All statements below are personal opinion and have no connection to Penn State University. Also, they are based on hearsay and reading just the timeline of the Freeh Report. I haven’t had enough time to read the entire 267-page report.
Jerry Sandusky should be castrated and thrown in prison for life.
Graham Spanier should have been terminated for cause and with prejudice for not reporting the incident(s) to the proper authorities and *his* direct report (the Board of Trustees). Instead he was just removed as President and revert to being a tenured professor, remaining in PSU employ.
As for Joe Paterno, he should not have been fired. He did his legal duty and reported the allegations to higher authority. Whether his moral duty required more of him, only he could have said.
I’m not sure how I feel about Curley and Schultz. I feel some action should be taken against them, but I’m unsure how severe. Where Paterno is not a direct report to the Board or the President, both these people are. They should have done more in investigating the incidents and in pushing for a legal response.
None of the people involved could have possibly been stupid enough to think this would never come into public knowledge, so they should have been aggressive in investigation and reporting, if only for the selfish reasons of not having themselves and Penn State dragged through the mud. If they had reported this, and fully participated in the investigation in a transparent manner, this could have been shown to be the actions of a single rogue employee. As it is now, everyone believes that all of Penn State *as an organization* is corrupt. Personally I don’t believe that, but I can understand why others would.
I’m a completely unathletic person as well, which is rather strange since three of my grandparents were gifted amateur athletes (soccer and a game called Prellball which only exists in Germany apparently). Nonetheless, I don’t mind sports and am a very casual fan of the local soccer team.
However, I consider university sports as practiced in the US completely out of place. A university is a place of higher education and research, hence the only sports practiced on campus should be intended for students of sports studies or for the physical relaxation of students. A university is no place for crowd-pleasing sports events – that’s the job of professional teams and clubs. And since we don’t have that sort of university sports culture in Germany, I don’t understand how huge amounts of money can be poured into something that neither benefits the students nor brings the university scientific glory.
I must confess I had never heard of Joe Paterno until e-publishing guru John Locke promoted a blog post called “Why I love Joe Paterno and my Mom” as the ideal blog post to draw readers, which caused me to look up who the hell Joe Paterno was.
IMO, anybody who became aware that the assistant coach was abusing children should have reported this to the police immediately. Child abuse is a crime and should be reported to the police and not to any other authority such as a university president. As for the university covering up for this guy and neither firing him nor informing the police at once, there is absolutely no excuse.
But what bothers me most about this is that this guy was not a Nobel Prize winning scientist or highly distinguished professor (and even then any incidence of child abuse should have been reported immediately), but an assistant football coach and therefore no more relevant to the university’s scientific and educational reputation than a janitor or a secretary. Actually, janitors and secretaries are more important, because they fulfill a vital function. An assistant football coach is just an assistant football coach.
I do feel sorry for the students and staff at Penn State University, who had absolutely nothing to do with this, but will forever have to live with the mark of working for/having graduated from “the child abuse university”. I graduated in 2007 from a place that used to be known as “the red university”, because it had an above average amount of outspoken Marxists and Socialists in the 1970s and still had to deal with prejudices because of that.
Another take:
Remember people. Any big organization can cover up child abuse, sexual or otherwise. The Hyperfocus on the Catholic Church, while warranted, has blinkered people to watching other organizations as well.