This morning, the NCAA handed down a punishment for Penn State for the Jerry Sandusky cover up. It doesn't look pretty for Penn State football. They have to donate $60 million to an endowment to protect children, give up 10 scholarships a year for 4 years, have their total scholarships reduced from 85 to 65, and are banned from playing in bowls for 4 years. On top of that, Joe Paterno had to vacate all of his coaching wins after 1998. The response from much of the Penn State community has been... sadly predictable. They're calling their new university president (who signed a consent decree acquiescing to the punishment) a coward. They've got some ridiculous conspiracy theory about Louis Freeh, their Board of Trustees, and ESPN all conspiring against them to soil Saint Paterno's legacy. They claim the punishment doesn't do anything for the victims and unnecessarily punishes their players and community for something they had nothing to do with. And, besides the players part, this completely misses the picture.
Their most common claim is that the Freeh Report made inferences regarding certain facts, and came to conclusions based on circumstantial evidence. Because of that, Paterno is somehow being crucified without being granted due process. Which is an entirely banal and stupid argument. Due process rights are granted to people in criminal trials. They have a different standard of proof because we think that criminal penalties for innocent people are really, really bad. This isn't a criminal case. It's not even a civil case (where the standard of proof is a preponderance of the evidence). It's a private governing body's investigation. The Freeh Report is damning in what it says about Joe Paterno. Plainly, it makes a strong case that, amid multiple reports that his former top assistant was raping young boys, he actively engaged in a cover-up, lobbied against suggestions that university administrators go to the police, and concerned himself with what was good for his football program at the expense of past, present, and future victims of a seriously horrific crime. In a way, Paterno and the others were just as bad as Sandusky-- true, they didn't rape young boys themselves. But they were more calculating and deliberate. Sandusky is a sick, sick person-- you almost have to be to do what he did. That doesn't excuse or justify his horrific crimes, but it does mean that he has serious delusions about them; people who don't have those delusions and have reason to suspect that they're occurring have a moral duty to make sure that those things can't happen, especially when they're happening on their watch (and yes, Sandusky did it on their watch, even after he formally retired).
It's certainly true that the punishment does some damage to those who don't deserve it; players who want to play at Penn State will either have to resign themselves to never playing in a bowl, or they'll have to transfer (though the NCAA has made that easier in this case). But what the penalties do, in a blunt way, is absolutely what should be done-- cut the football program at the school down to size. Because that was really the heart of the institutional problem there. Paterno wasn't just the football coach at Penn State-- he was the face of the university. Before this incident broke, 99.99% of Americans outside of Penn State students and alumni had no clue who the president and athletic director were. And, while that's the case at a lot of major D-I schools, Paterno wielded a power at Penn State that was almost unprecedented.
Mike Krzyzewski is by far the best-known employee of Duke University. You could say the same for a whole lot of big-time college football and basketball coaches. Bob Knight was a legend at Indiana. But what seems unique about Penn State was that Joe Paterno was no one's employee. When Bob Knight got himself into trouble at Indiana, he got some leeway. Then he was forced out. If Krzyzewski at Duke were found to have likely covered up a single rape (or, for that matter, any number of less egregious crimes), you can bet the university would dump him, no questions asked. And I don't even like Krzyzewski or Duke. When Penn State tried to push Paterno out the door in 2004, he laughed, told them he wasn't going anywhere, and that was that. His players were exempted from incoming freshman sexual assault education at Penn State. Paterno fought (successfully) to keep them out of the university's disciplinary procedure. The football program was its own fiefdom, and Paterno was the top dog. When the child abuse allegations came to light, it was ultimately Paterno who had the last word. There was an exchange in the Freeh Report where I believe the AD and a top VP agreed to go to child welfare with the 2001 allegations. Then, a subsequent e-mail from the AD said that after speaking with "Joe", he was no longer "comfortable" with that course of action. It's clear that Paterno was at least his ostensible superiors' equal. In all likelihood, they answered to him just as much as, if not more than, he answered to them.
It was this dynamic that needed to be fixed. Joe Paterno ostensibly did some very good things at Penn State-- he graduated a lot of players, he donated a good chunk of money to build a library, and I'm sure plenty of his players have great things to say about him. But, as a person, he was an enormous moral failure. Covering up child rape isn't "one mistake"-- shoplifting is one mistake. Getting into a fight is one mistake. Cheating on a test is one mistake. Even robbing the bank is one mistake. Doing nothing when you have ANY reason to believe a child predator is not just loose, but making use of your facilities to commit his crimes is an enormous moral failure that defines you. The lives of many, possibly tens, of people have been ruined because Paterno stood by and did nothing.
And, in large part, it was the devotion to Paterno and to football that allowed it to happen. Because Paterno talked a lot about honor (though he turned out to have none), graduated more players than most college football coaches, and donated some money to the library, the assumption was that he should get leeway to run his football programs as he sees fit. He was beyond the reach of the administration. In an important sense, he was the most powerful person on Penn State's campus. And he turned out to be a moral coward. But he couldn't have done that on his own. To become that powerful, he needed a campus culture that acceded to it. He needed administrators who wouldn't, or couldn't, push him. He needed students and alumni who saw him as a god. And he got that. The punishment of the football program lashes out at Penn State football because, in an important regard, Penn State football is the problem. Not the players or Bill O'Brien (the current coach), or those people, but the mindset that Penn State football is "above the law" at the university. Crippling that program will hopefully break that hold-- it will put football into a proper perspective. It's a lot of fun, it's a community event for students and alumni, and it's a source of pride. In plenty of cases, it's an incubator of future pros. But, even if football players at Penn State are separate from the rest of the campus (as they are at most high D-I schools), they can't be above reproach-- they should have to attend campus safety workshops with other students; when they do something wrong, they should be punished like other students; and, if something goes wrong that necessitates a response from the administration, they should be subject to sanctions, same as any other students.
At Penn State, the myth of Saint Joe is, in large part, what allowed a child predator to continue raping kids for well over a decade, even though there was smoke out there indicating that he was a problem. Dismantling that mentality is what the sanctions aim to do. And Penn State students and alumni who cry about the "lynching" of Paterno and the victimization of the football program are prime evidence of why that program needs to be sanctioned in that way-- hopefully losing some games will put football and the coach's role in its proper perspective at a place where it was horribly, tragically out of whack.
Spot on.
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