What’s that? What was that you said? Professor? Sandusky a professor?
Ask yourself: What’s the most powerful constituency on a university campus? It’s almost always the professors. When professors get together they are very powerful. Where were Penn State’s professors when… Well, whenever? Why didn’t that totally fucked by football school have at least one Thomas Palaima, one William Dowling, one faculty member who spoke out about how sick the place was? You don’t have to have known anything about Sandusky to know the school was a football whore.
But no. Not only did the Penn State professors – displaying real degeneracy, franchement – just look the other way as their school turned into a cult of personality. Not one of them opened their trap to say… I mean, you don’t even have to write an essay! Just say you’re embarrassed! Just complain to the school paper now and then!
For that matter, where are the professors now? Where’s the formal statement from the faculty about how horrible these events are, etc? Why did it take Louis Freeh to complain about the culture of sport at Penn State? What happened to the headline that should have said
PENN STATE PROFESSOR ATTACKS CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS
Where did that go? Or – even better:
PENN STATE PROFESSORS ATTACK CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS
July 12th, 2012 at 2:40PM
The Penn State story is a particularly grim example of the situation among administrators and trustees in many places: indifference, cynicism, incompetence, skewed priorities, etc. Students are being short-changed and everybody knows it. The professoriate is silent about that as well.
July 12th, 2012 at 6:46PM
Oh the PROFESSORS. Like Prof. Sandra SPANIER on the English faculty? http://english.la.psu.edu/faculty-staff/sxs74
July 13th, 2012 at 6:10AM
We expected more from Michael Berubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature? Here’s his response. Pretty weak beer for a leader in the MLA.
July 13th, 2012 at 6:13AM
I’m just stunned. Did the administration not ANNOUNCE the emeritus faculty standing? I can’t imagine a professoriate so supine that if someone had noticed this would not have raised a stink about making a coach a professor emeritus. Evidently my imagination needed to be stretched.
July 13th, 2012 at 11:48AM
Come, now, you can’t expect a president of the MLA and Paterno Family professor to have time for such things. According to his CV he was too busy chairing the strategic planning committee and serving on the ethics advisory board and the “President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration” committee and running or chairing a dozen other groups. And of course it’s just coincidence that he and his colleagues at one of the biggest academic group blogs on the Internet have been totally silent about this report even though they feel passionately about immigration or the Iraq war.
Not that the Paterno Family Professor of Literature bears responsibility for what happened at Penn, but it would be nice to see him at least appear to show leadership on an issue where college sports destroyed lives. If tenure doesn’t give him the freedom to speak out at this time, then he ostensibly becomes a walking argument against it.
August 20th, 2017 at 1:00AM
This all still disturbs me. I heard Graham Spanier address the annual COIA meeting at Big Ten Headquarters in Chicago in late January 2011. He told us of the high moral standards he enforced throughout the NCAA program, every year telling everyone connected with the program that he wanted to know about the slightest infraction. Ten months later the truth was revealed. And still big-time football rolls on. There will be statues to Joe Pa. Want a trivial parallel? Go visit Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Web site. Nothing there about having to resign from the Pulitzer board because of more than one case of large-scale plagiarism in her books.
Author Goodwin Resigns From Pulitzer Board
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK NYTimes JUNE 1, 2002
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin resigned yesterday from the board that chooses the winners of the Pulitzer Prize. The prize had begun an inquiry into accusations that Ms. Goodwin copied the work of others in her 1987 book ”The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.”
The board released a terse letter of resignation from Ms. Goodwin. She wrote that she could no longer devote enough attention to the board because of the controversy surrounding the book and the need to work on a biography of Abraham Lincoln.
People involved with the 19-member board said they believed it was the first time a member had resigned because of a controversy.
Ms. Goodwin has referred all questions to her lawyer, Michael Nussbaum, who did not return calls seeking comment.
Ms. Goodwin acknowledged in January that her publisher, Simon & Schuster, reached a private settlement in 1987 with another author over accusations of plagiarism, agreeing to a payment and the addition of footnotes to the text.
Continue reading the main story
August 20th, 2017 at 8:33AM
Tom: My equivalent of your 2011 meeting was attending the 2009 Knight Commission meeting here in DC, where no less than Tim Curley delivered the same moral uplift you heard.
And as to still being upset about it: Just read/listen to what’s coming out of UNC Chapel Hill these days. Same sort of place; same sort of uplift. Relax: All is well.