I’m going to take a break from politics a bit to talk about the Penn State case. Normally, I’d let it alone, but there’s a big debate brewing over the penalties the Penn State football program has sustained and I want to talk about them. The debate started as soon as the NCAA said they would take action against Penn State and has gone unabated through the announcement this morning.
In politics, it’s an axiom that the cover up is always worse than the actual crime. Watergate, after all, was just a botched break-in. In that regard, the Penn State scandal is one of those rare situations when the cover up isn’t worse than the crime. It’s hard to say which is worse actually – decades of child sexual abuse or the cover up of decades of child sexual abuse.
This morning, we learned that as a result of the Freeh investigation of Penn State, the NCAA has levied an unprecedented package of penalties, including $60 million in fines (only one year of revenue for the program), reduction in scholarships, erasing all of the 1998-2011 wins to take away Paterno’s title as winningest coach in history, and a ban on bowl games for 4 years. While this wasn’t the death penalty, it is a major blow to their program.
As is to be expected, there are a lot of folks who are unhappy about this. We’re punishing the kids, not the adults who caused this problem, the argument goes. We’re ignoring the fact that everyone who was there and covered things up is gone. And we’re ignoring the potential impact of the damage to Penn State’s football program may have on the surrounding community. Why punish the whole school for what a few people did?
The reason for the punishment is simple: the crime itself has been fully punished but the cover up has not. Sandusky is in jail and will be for the rest of his life. Whatever crimes Joe Paterno may have committed he’s had adjudicated by a higher power. The cover up, however, has not been fully punished. The former President is gone, and everyone else involved has been fired, but the culture of Penn State – where football matters more than everything else – remains.
That culture – the idea that Penn State is an athletics program that does education on the side – must be addressed. I lived in Pennsylvania for eight years, and many of my friends from high school attended Penn State. Many of the teachers in my high school were Penn State grads. I can recall my 9th grade geometry teacher being a Penn State fan and graduate – that’s where I first learned who Joe Paterno was, as the teacher routinely did Penn State cheers in the class. For years, I didn’t know anything about the school other than the football program.
It was this culture that made the cover up possible. It’s hard to understate how important college football is to Penn State, State College and the entire Penn State alumni community. Even now, after the worst has come out, the program still has vociferous defenders. It is that kind of pressure and support that made the cover up possible. The President of the University, Graham Spanier, Paterno and the others who were responsible for the cover up wouldn’t have covered such heinous crimes up if they didn’t think doing so would somehow protect the football program as a whole. It was the entire culture of Penn State football and its importance to the school that created the morally indefensible situation where grown men decided that covering up a child predator’s reign of terror and stopping him was not as important as maintaining the reputation of a sports program.
Dozens of lives were ruined, but the men charged with protecting those kids were more interested in protecting their program. And why? Because of the culture that had grown up around Penn State football.
That culture is pervasive and includes just about everyone in the Penn State community. The pressure to win, from alumni to current students, the utter dependence of State College and the Penn State system on the revenue football brings in, and the hero worship lauded on Paterno all created the environment that made it possible for the cover up to happen. Just look at how the students at Penn State tried to protect the statue of Paterno earlier this week.
Penn State erected a golden calf in the form of its football program, and doing so destroyed the lives of dozens of young boys.
The fact that those students would do so much for a statute, demonstrates the point – the program itself has had a corrupting influence on the school. The school needs to right itself, and it can’t do so if things remained business as usual. Now they have lost a years worth of football revenue and the loss of an entire 4 years worth of bowl games, which will have a major impact on their recruiting. For the first time in decades, Penn State will have to focus on something other than football. That can only be a good thing.
I’m glad the NCAA has stepped in and forced Penn State – not just the school but its entire community – to recognize they too played a role in what happened. Until Penn State, as a community, realizes that they’re in the education business not the football business, nothing will have been learned from this whole tragedy.
