… for another Sandusky go-round, this one focused on ex-president Graham Spanier, “charged with eight criminal counts, including child endangerment, perjury and conspiring to cover up Sandusky’s crimes.”
Penn State is awash in lawsuits and rancor, with no end in sight…
Like that of almost all of the big college football powers, its identity, to an unhealthy extent, is wrapped up in its [football] team…
Lawsuits, rancor, a board of trustees beginning to look like a mad tea party, and the re-deification of Joe Paterno…
July 17th, 2014 at 10:05AM
And with all that, the students keep coming and learning, and the faculty keep teaching and researching. Just goes to show how much of that–trustees, president, football is unnecessary.
July 18th, 2014 at 10:13PM
The article is worth reading rather than just linking to. I think it both complicates your long-standing and entirely justified critique of the influence of sports on higher education and affirms it.
I found myself convinced by the end that Spanier is likely guilty of little more than not paying much attention to Paterno & Co., e.g., understanding football as something that took care of itself and that in any event wasn’t what he was interested in. He was spending time building up the faculty, building new facilities for academics, fund-raising in general. He seems to me to have not been, as you often put it, a simple jock-sniffer, a chief executive so enamored of football (or of the wealthy donors enamored of football) that he enthusiastically abetted its abuses.
But the interesting, almost-Shakespearean thing the article lays out is that not only did his relative inattention doom him in the first go-round (by letting men who would never police their own run the football program largely unattended) but it doomed him especially once the news really broke. The fascinating point the article raises is that to avoid the death penalty for football, the insanely pro-football trustees were willing to burn almost everything or anything to the ground: the president, the institution, whatever it took. Just don’t stop football.
July 19th, 2014 at 2:24AM
Tim: Totally agree with your final paragraph about the death penalty and the insanely pro-football trustees.
We’ll see how Spanier’s trial goes. I incline toward thinking that his inattention tipped over into active neglect of the welfare of others. That is, I think he must have known bad and twisted things were happening on his campus, but not only did he do nothing about them. He seems (on the evidence of some of his emails) to have actively sought ways to avoid reporting/publicizing them. So rather than “inattention,” I’d lean toward “dereliction of duty.”
I think what also doomed him, by the way, is the general perception of big-time university football as morally filthy (not as filthy as pro football, of course; but the two are seen – rightly – as part of the same world). Spanier’s going to take the fall for the weird emotions so many Americans harbor about this particular guilty pleasure of theirs.
July 19th, 2014 at 12:49PM
Except I think Spanier is completely right to protest that university presidents, especially of places as large as Penn State, can’t really hope to pay attention to what someone at the level of a Sandusky is up to. In fact, if they tried, I assume the faculty and even some of the staff would be up in arms when and if the gaze from the top settled on their own precincts. The few presidents who do try to micromanage the daily business of their institutions are of the tinpot dictator subspecies of manager–the John Silbers and Leon Botsteins. What it seems to me we should ask and expect of presidents is that they’ve established a strong reporting chain with no weak links, e.g., everybody all the way down the reporting structure has a good sense of proportionality about what needs attention further up, and that there are no breaks in the chain, so that when misconduct with potentially dire implications for the institution is detected (serious criminality, abuse, breaches in research ethics), it gets flagged all the way up to the top. That’s clearly what didn’t happen at Penn State, and the main reason to go after Spanier might be simply to put every other university president on warning that if they just let athletics run itself without supervision, they’re putting their own administrations and their whole institution at risk. It needs to be more dangerous to give football carte blanche than to try to put it under scrutiny–right now, a chief executive is taking a bigger risk in terms of being unseated by zealot trustees and donors when they insist on that kind of scrutiny.
July 19th, 2014 at 5:35PM
The problem isn’t with Penn State, it’s with The Second Mile Foundation. Sandusky started the nonprofit back in 1978, and that’s where he did his major damage. I would suggest that anyone interested look at the BOT of the foundation, it’s a list of the most prominent PA citizens, including Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier. Question being, why did the BOT allow Sandusky to remain at the SMF, despite investigations of sexual misconduct years before? SMF was closely connected to Penn State, so again, why didn’t Paterno, Spanier, et.al, not recuse themselves from having anything to do with either Sandusky or his organization? Why did they continue to serve? Someone has to ask those questions…..