THE worst scandal in the history of college athletics, involving charges of serial child rape and systemic covering up, is almost too much to comprehend. The breaches of trust — on the part of a former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, toward vulnerable children, and on the part of Penn State administrators who responded to a credible report of child rape in 2002 merely by barring him from bringing young boys onto campus — reach far beyond the world of ordinary big-time college sports corruption.
The public image of Penn State is now that of students rioting on behalf of a disgraced football coach. But there are also 6,000 full-time teachers and researchers working here — and none of us had anything to do with this mess. Like the vast majority of our 45,000 students, we did not riot. We are every bit as disgusted and horrified as you are. This is our place that has been trashed, and we care deeply about cleaning it up.
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Mr. Paterno and three university presidents — Bryce Jordan, Joab L. Thomas and Graham B. Spanier — were determined to compete with their counterparts in the Big Ten off the field as well as on. The Paterno family endowed two professorships that testify to their commitment to the humanities; one is in the library. The other is in English. I’m well acquainted with that professorship, since I happen to hold it.
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Penn State has been an emphatically “top-down” university; decisions, even about academic programs, are made by the central administration, and faculty members are “consulted” afterward. Now Penn State will very likely lose its exemption from open records laws, and rightly so. But the administration must begin treating faculty members, and their elected representatives on the Faculty Senate, as equal partners in the institution. Perhaps if a faculty ethics committee had been informed about Mr. Sandusky in 2002, one of us could have advised administrators to inquire more aggressively into the case instead of circling the football program’s wagons.
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No comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/opinion/at-penn-state-a-bitter-reckoning.html