A hurricane has rumbled through Penn State University. Retired assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky has been charged with 40 counts of sexually abusing and assaulting young boys. University President Graham Spanier and legendary football head coach Joe Paterno have been sacked.
Penn State students erupted in delirium Wednesday night, protesting the firing of their iconic coach with embarrassing, deplorable riots. It is hard for outsiders to understand the devotion Penn State students and the State College community have to their coach, but everyone can grasp the heinousness of Sandusky’s crimes and Paterno’s role as an enabler.
Mike McQueary, an inexplicably still-employed assistant coach who witnessed Sandusky having anally raping a young boy in 2002, reported what he saw to Paterno the next day. Paterno then set a meeting up with athletic director Tim Curley. Those quick to jump to Paterno’s defense cite that he did indeed tell someone about the acts, and did what he could to put them to an end.
But he didn’t do enough. Paterno has monolithic power on that campus, and although in writing he is only the head football coach, he is the de facto czar of Penn State. He had the power to stop Sandusky for good. He did not.
Such is the world of big money college sports.
Sports are blinding. They exist in a world all their own and when the shit hits the fan, it’s swept under the rug. Winning games and keeping the athletic status quo is priority No. 1, and it doesn’t matter how many skeletons you hoard in the closet, so long as the closet doesn’t burst open onto the playing field.
That blindness was ever-present during the Old Main riots, where students were violently coming to the defense of someone who covered up the horrific behavior of an assistant — and friend.
Penn State students need to momentarily put aside their image of Paterno as a legend and campus hero, and consider the consequences of this man’s actions dispassionately. They need to ask how many children were abused, molested or raped because Paterno shirked his duty as a human being.
It is worth noting that the staff of Penn State’s student paper, The Daily Collegian, has remained admirably level-headed throughout this ordeal. In an editorial from Nov. 7, The Daily Collegian wrote, “The moral failure of every single person involved is appalling. No one did anything more than try to sweep this problem off campus.”
We understand what it’s like to get caught up in the thrill of prosperous athletics, only to have national media uncover the whirlwind of wrongdoings happening behind the curtains. The nature of Binghamton University’s basketball scandal, of course, does not, in any form, come even remotely close to matching the seriousness of the Penn State tragedy — and the Collegian Staff has been inspiring as its campus has been rocked by an existential crisis.
Paterno’s Penn State team was a beacon of academic and athletic high ground, an American institution. According to their recruitment letter, “Penn State is 1 of 2 Division I institutions who have never been investigated or sanctioned for any major NCAA infractions.”
Joe Paterno built a program based on unprecedented integrity, and the juxtaposition of the supposedly perfect program he ran, against Sandusky’s base behavior has created a perfect storm, creating a scandal unlike any we’ve ever seen.