During the last half-century, you’d be hard-pressed to find many programs in college football that were more respected than Penn State or a coach who was more revered than Joe Paterno. But all that they had achieved now lies in ashes. To understand why, one need only read the results of this investigation into Penn State’s sexual abuse scandal.
The seven-month investigation, based on 430 interviews and some 3.5 million documents, excoriates the university’s leadership – including then-Head Coach Joe Paterno, President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Vice President Gary Schultz – for covering up allegations of sexual abuse by Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky. (Last month Sandusky was found guilty on 45 of 48 sex abuse counts.) This happened in part because they were concerned about negative publicity.
“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State,” said former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who led the investigation. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized.” The report highlights a “striking lack of empathy” for the victims. And the investigation shows that Paterno, who died in January, was an integral part of an “active decision to conceal.” It appears as if the former coach of the Nittany Lions not only lied to reporters but to a grand jury as well. (Paterno insisted he had no knowledge of a 1998 police inquiry into child molestation accusations against Sandusky, his assistant coach.)
The report is a horrifying account of individual and institutional failure, based in part on a “culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus.”
Consider just one incident. In 2000, a janitor at the football building saw Sandusky assaulting a boy in the showers. According to Freeh, “The janitor who observed it says it’s the worst thing he ever saw. He’s a Korean War veteran. … He spoke to the other janitors. They were awed and shocked by it. But, what did they do? They said they can’t report this because they’d be fired. They were afraid to take on the football program. They said the university would circle around it. It was like going against the president of the United States. If that’s the culture on the bottom, God help the culture at the top.”
What appears to have happened is that otherwise good men, when confronted with evidence that they had a monster in their midst, decided to cover up the crimes in hopes of protecting their reputations and those of their university. That decision began a chain of events that made them complicit in unspeakable acts.
This is not the first time individuals and institutions have turned a blind eye toward, and then become complicit in, malevolence. It occurred in the Catholic Church as well, as this 2004 report showed. The reasons such things happen are extremely complicated. It starts, I suppose, with — to invoke a word that is increasingly out of fashion these days — sin, which touches all of us to one degree or another. Human beings are a mixture of virtue and vice, of nobility and corruption, of good intentions and depraved motivations. Within every person lies competing and sometimes contradictory moral impulses and currents. It was Solzhenitsyn, in reflecting on his time in the Gulag, who wrote:
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
The challenge of civilizations has been to set up institutional arrangements that take into account the human condition and channel it in ways that encourage the good and place a check on evil. What this means is that in our universities, in our churches, and in our political systems – in virtually every human institution – we need checks and balances. We need accountability. And we need transparency. The concentration of power — when combined with pride, arrogance, ambition, and fear — can lead even impressive people to act in unjust and repellant ways.
What happened at Penn State was a massive institutional failure combined with massive personal failures. In the process, crimes were committed. Reputations were destroyed. A university was shamed. And worst of all, children were abused and scarred for life.
This is not a new story, or even the worst story we have seen. But it is sickening enough. At Penn State, the line through the human heart shifted dramatically in the direction of evil.
Tempting though it is, I don't really buy your theological/sin angle on this aweful situation. Let's reserve "evil" for people who chop off heads of Daniel Pearl; to people who roast children alive to terrorize others; to the beasts and murders and terrorists. What happened in Penn State was, in a sense, evil, but we need this concept for even more important challenges, so let's not overuse it.
It was worse. n nIn war, we kill adults intentionally and unintentionally. We do not however, ever, ever, accept as just the victimization of a child (pure innocence). n nUnder any moral rationale I am familiar with, this was evil. Your lack of recognition of this demonstrates the author's point.
Thanks, BDZ; you're the one voice of sanity that I've heard thus far. It's time to put this thing in perspective.
Inflicting unimaginable physical pain and psychological terror on many children and doing so repeatedly over a decade and a half doesn't qualify as evil in your book? Well in that case I've got a couple of horny homosexual guerrillas I'd like you to spend a weekend or two with.
Sandusky was evil, to be sure. Calling Penn State evil is over the top. Al Queada is evil. Nazi Germany was evil. The Charles Manson gang was evi. And as I said, Sandusky is and was evil. And probably some other officials at Penn State were evil. But let's not get carried away with this notion that the institution is evil, as the title of this post implies.
In a sense, evil? n nGreater evils do not excuse lesser evils – and the evil perpetrated at Pens State was certainly not negligible. n nEvil generally starts small and grows. When it's small and hasn't had time to grow, it's still evil and should be recognized and named as such. Using it for both the small and the large does not devalue the word "evil." n nAs for the question of the "theological/sin" angle, that isn't in my worldview either – but I believe any worldview that is realistic about human nature has to recognize the aspect of human beings that is called "evil" in most theological systems. Personally, I'm a Buddhist – we call it "greed, hatred, and illusion." n nEvil by any other name still stinks.
BDZ n nIf you're uncomfortable calling these acts and their coverup "evil", then perhaps you should check where 'the line that separates good and evil' has shifted to within your own heart..
The extremely sad truth about this extremely sordid affair is that it could have happened on any college campus/university in the nation, and certainly not be restricted to football coaches. One of the several problems with such bastions of quintessential Liberalism is that not only have they for decades been bending over backwards – I said backwards, not forwards – to accommodate homosexuality, but they have also been intolerant of any restraint on homosexuality. This has opened the door as wide as possible to tacitly enabling unsavory practices related to homosexuality all over. It is not surprising at all that this mess surfaced somewhere. My bet is that all sorts of related things have been going on in various forms in many such Liberal institutions; and right now who knows how many “people in authority” are struggling with similar issues behind closed doors – goodness, it is hard to avoid double-entendres with this subject. “People in authority” on college campi is an oxymoron, if ever there was one, as far as this matter is concerned. n nOverall this situation is very much like that famous line from Casablanca: “I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that gambling is going on there.” However, what is even more shocking is how many people seem to be not cynically shocked, but genuinely shocked. Helloooo!!
In a word: balderdash!
Sorry, trying to pass the buck to the homosexuals is specious. This had nothing to do with appeasing liberalism (bad as liberal "tolerance" may be in many ways, they draw the line at pedophiles) or gays, but everything to do with a corrupt football culture. That you would try to special plead this issue for your pet political hobby horse is disgraceful. You would better spend your time keeping track of gay symbolism in teletubby TV episodes.
I agree, but you have to admit there is something really weird and oddly sexualized in Teletubbies.
That purple one with the handbag, oh!
"Evil" may be too strong a word — but what I got was that Wehner was looking morally, in order to understand why it makes him so uneasy. What happened was the whole thing was ignored and forgotten. Whatever justification there was in dealing with it privately (like, say, getting help for someone rather than tar and feathering them — such as, and I'm not offering an opinion but pointing to a conflict, there really is an unresolved debate on how can sexual predators get help if their psychiatrist is required to notify the police of any crimes they admit) … didn't result in dealing with it. Nobody tried to help or stop him. And then out of sight out of mind. n nIn _The Fall_, by existentialist Albert Camus, the narrator tells how when he was out walking he heard someone jump off a bridge into the river below … and he did nothing about it and then spent the rest of his life trying to live with that. At Penn State, they all went home and had dinner. End of story.