5 years after Sandusky, Penn State has learned nothing. Zilch. Nada
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/5-years-into-Sanduskygate-Penn-State-has-learned-nothing-Zilch-Nada.html
I've spent a lot of my life studying revolutions -- but there's really only two things I can say about them for sure. First, somebody's statue -- for better or worse -- always comes down. Second, in the end most of them fail. (Even the American Revolution?...the jury is still out.) This afternoon -- true story -- I was almost at my 8th and Market stop on the subway, blasting "1971 Hits" on Pandora and trying to collect my thoughts about the latest outrages at Penn State, as well as Joe Paterno and that darn statue, when The Who's Pete Townshend windmilled the first power chord of "Won't Get Fooled Again."
"Meet the new boss," Roger Daltrey wailed. "Same as the old boss." Too perfect for Penn State's latest debacle? Maybe...maybe not. True, "the change, it had to come" to State College, after the shockwaves of 2011 when we learned not only about the serial child-sex crimes of former PSU top football assistant Jerry Sandusky, but the powerful evidence of a cover-up that spanned more than a decade, at least, and allegedly included top officials up to the university president, the athletic director, and the iconic (literally, for once) Paterno.
But the Penn State "revolution"...never really was. That removal of the massive, 7-foot-tall Paterno statue outside PSU's Beaver Stadium was never really an indictment of the Nittany Lions' once-revered coach and his alleged failure to act when he learned in 2001 that an assistant had apparently seen Sandusky raping a child in a campus locker room shower. It was just one more desperate ploy to make the unspeakable reality -- not just the stain of a national child-sex-abuse, but the wider moral rot of the institution where it took place -- go away....
In the four years since Sandusky's conviction and the removal of the Paterno statue, the public focus at Penn State has always been less about acknowledging the most shameful chapter in the school's history, and more about getting the football program restored to its lofty former heights. Even the most admirable thing to come from the ashes of the scandal -- the funding of programs for child-sex abuse, including a Penn State Center for the Protection of Children -- became tangled to some degree in the football program's successful push to get back into year-end bowl games as soon as possible. (The $60 million fine levied on PSU by the NCAA, after a bitter court fight, will finally go to anti-child-sex-abuse programs; again, Erickson had spun the levy not as the right thing to do but as the NCAA wanting "blood" -- something the university had to agree to, to avoid the "death penalty" for the football program.
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