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“Spanier bizarrely invites the entire world to revisit the sordid affair via a libel suit he will almost certainly lose.”

Ah, Penn State. Took our eye off that ball for a bit.

Yeshiva University has been hogging the sex abuse limelight lately… But now that PSU’s most recent president, Graham Spanier, has sued Louis Freeh for libel, we must all pop our favorite antiemetic and swivel our attention back there.

UD doubts there’s an antiemetic strong enough for us to look at both campuses at once.

Weird bizarre shameless odd sad and insane are some of the adjectives the Bloomberg Business Week writer I quote in my headline uses in his piece as he tries to figure out why a once reasonably respectable man – a man now under criminal indictment for endangering the welfare of a child – launches an unwinnable lawsuit that can only bring greater disgrace to himself and the university that continues to employ him as a professor.

What can I say… It’s damnably difficult for people who’ve been university presidents, who have flown in (taxpayer-provided) private jets, and who have run massive sports empires, to think ill of themselves. Year after year they get spectacular evaluations from the trustees, who (at places like Penn State and Gordon Gee’s Ohio State) want caretakers who leave the coaches alone. Now suddenly just because some old fart coach got caught in the shower Spanier’s being attacked!

We’ve spent the last year watching several university presidents be destroyed by the sports programs on their campuses. Other presidents (Donna Shalala most notably) have been reduced to little more than NCAA petitioners. Yet UD doubts there’s one university president in America who thinks it can happen to him or her. Spanier’s nutty libel suit emerges out of the toxic, only-in-America combination of presidential grandeur and sports pimping.

Margaret Soltan, July 12, 2013 3:40PM
Posted in: sport

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One Response to ““Spanier bizarrely invites the entire world to revisit the sordid affair via a libel suit he will almost certainly lose.””

  1. david foster Says:

    Wonder if Spanier is aware of how Oscar Wilde’s libel suit worked out?

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