“Football and the university melded at Penn State,” says Charles Yesalis, emeritus professor of health policy and administration at Penn State, who lived and taught in State College, Pa. for 25 years before moving to Virginia a few months ago. “The sports program and the university are one, in part because Paterno was the most powerful person on campus, by far. That’s what was problematic here, what made Penn State different. I don’t know of another place where that’s been allowed to happen. There was no firewall. Other universities have sustained that firewall.”
Penn State’s perspective got warped. “When these people decided to ruin their lives to keep the reputation of Penn State and Penn State football, I wasn’t surprised,” says Yesalis, who has also co-written a new book, The Fundamentals of U.S. Health Care: Perspectives and Principles. “Very much of the behavior was cult-like. There is this arrogance that ‘we are Penn State, we are above the law.’” When he chaired a committee on athletic compliance over a decade ago, Yesalis remembers suggesting that the university hire an outside auditor to make sure Penn State was following the rules. “I hate when people talk about body language and everything,” says Yesalis. “I’m a scientist, I think it’s total bullshit. Having said that, I looked around the table, and these people thought I had antlers coming out of my goddam head, because I questioned the integrity of Penn State.”
Skeptics have been peeling back the Penn State onion for several years now. In 2008, ESPN calculated that in the previous six years, 46 Penn State football players had faced a total of 163 criminal charges; 27 had been convicted or had pleaded guilty.
… [E]specially for a school of its size and budget — it has the largest campus in the Northeast and the 10th largest in the country — Penn State doesn’t match its football team’s prominence in very many of its myriad classrooms.
I took a look at the U.S. News & World Report rankings to see where the school stood. Its professional schools are barely mediocre: Business ranks 44th, law ranks 76th, medicine is so obscure that I couldn’t find it on the published list. The school is in the top rank nationally in only a handful of disciplines: earth sciences, criminology, and industrial and nuclear engineering.
Penn State’s other major strength, at least until now, was in several sub-specialties of education: administration and supervision, counseling and personnel, educational psychology, and higher education administration.
The sad irony of these rankings is unbearable.
His last sentence is a little strange. Because it scores well in counseling we shouldn’t expect its leadership to cover up child rape in order to protect its football program?
… which Deadspin calls, correctly, “full of shit.”
Joe Paterno spent the last interview of his life lying to a journalist to protect his legacy.
But not just any journalist. This blog has followed with amazement Jenkins’ (scroll down) worship of university sports and coaches, and her excited proposal that universities make football an academic major and coaches professors. Jenkins was one more Paterno patsy, one more idiot-audience for his integrity act. The Washington Post should be ashamed.
America’s latest big-time embezzler embezzled for twenty years and says he felt “constant and intense guilt” about it.
But how constant and intense can anything be for twenty years straight? UD, for instance, figures she can maintain constant and intense interest in… let’s take something she’s intensely interested in, as interested as this guy, bigshot trustee of the University of Northern Iowa, was in grand theft. So we just had Bloomsday, and UD‘s a James Joyce freak and she read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club and spent time preparing all that and talking endlessly with fellow Joyce people and reading and rereading various passages from Ulysses…
Okay so I’d say UD managed to sustain constant and intense interest in Bloomsday, this summer, for around, say, two weeks… How much more difficult to sustain constant and intense guilt for twenty years over your assiduous theft of millions of dollars from innocent people!
You say guilt is different from interest?
Then let’s look at perhaps the most intensely guilt-ridden figure of our time — Franz Kafka. Kafka certainly majorly dragged his ass around Prague, but we also have it on good authority that he was fully capable of having a good time. A reviewer of Kafka’s diaries says that they fail to give the reader a sense of “the humorous and light-hearted Kafka, the man who walked around in the day and earned the respect, fondness, and love of his friends and coworkers.”
Let’s say that – we can only give a rough estimate here – Kafka spent around half of his time feeling guilt; and of the time he felt guilt, let’s say that only about a quarter of that was intense and constant.
And, you know, Kafka did something with that guilt. He wrote guilt-ridden stories like The Judgment to work through it or whatever. This guy, Mr University of Northern Iowa, felt unremitting dripdripdrip guilt over stealing from people for twenty years but not only did he not write one of those quirky weird-prairie short stories about it, he didn’t, say, turn himself in to the authorities, or stop stealing.
Commencement speaker, recipient of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree — Dimon’s the Joe Paterno of Syracuse. Let’s catch up with his latest accomplishment.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) had already lost more than $700 million on synthetic credit bets and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon was told that number could climb to almost $1 billion when he dismissed press reports about the positions in April as a “tempest in a teapot.”
While JPMorgan booked a $718 million loss on the positions held by its chief investment office in the first quarter, it didn’t publicly specify the loss when releasing the results April 13. When an analyst asked Dimon that day about media coverage of the trades, he dismissed them as a minor issue.
“… [T]he deep structural failings of Italy — an inefficient public sector, a poor demographic outlook, lousy universities, a calamitously slow judicial system — will take years to put right.”
This blog has covered the lousy universities.
http://www.economist.com/node/21558237
… is the latest social psychologist to be Simonized.
Wonderfully, his work had to do with morality. He proved by numbers that tall people are more ethical than short people.
I mean, he proved it until he got Simonized.
A lot of people are saying this about Penn State football.
But pause.
Reflect.
What is left of Penn State without football? It’s the same question you’d need to ask about the University of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and a host of others. A few scattered academic departments; a demoralized student body transferring out in search of a tailgate; yawning stadia assuming the aspect of meteor craters.
The silence alone will kill most of the stragglers. Campus will come on all scholarly-like, and drinking will go from post-game debauch to post-Soviet despair. Here and there amid the twilight-of-the-superheroes vastation, crazed, tattered philosophy faculty will wail like Diogenes while enflamed remnant-students throw stones at them.
It’s a classic post-Freeh fret from a veteran jock pen. The giveaways are phrases like “our cherished universities” and words like “tragedy” to describe the Penn State story.
Ooh, I was so naive! the writer tells us. Although I’ve been covering university football for decades, I just, I dunno, thought the higher-ups at Penn State were good, decent people… And here comes this Freeh report and JEEZ.
Well, let’s wrap this up by saying I sure hope things will get better now!
F-u-u-u-u-u-ck you.
You know, as well as any random Penn State professor knows, how systemically sick Penn State and plenty of other football factories like it are. You’ve always known. What you’re saying today is what all the hacks are saying to their jock readers:
We are poor little lambs who have lost our way.
Baa, baa, baa.
We are little black sheep who have gone astray.
Baa, baa, baa.
Okay! We bleated our little bleat!
Now…
… back to the luxury box!
… is the motto of many American universities, whether diploma mills or for-profits. Their admissions requirements are can we get you to come and stay long enough for us to collect federal money?
The latest recruiting practices lawsuit is against San Francisco’s Academy of Art .
“The suit claims there were no other legitimate criteria on which the recruiters were judged” beyond hurling bodies forward.
‘Don’t be concerned about the smoke, folks. We braked hard for awhile back there and kicked up some dust. Everything’s fine.’
‘This is Clarence at the Cafe Car. The Cafe Car is not now at this time currently open because of technical difficulties. Once the technical difficulties are resolved I will make an announcement that the Cafe Car is open. The Cafe Car is now currently not open. Thank you.’
‘Provincetown is next. A reminder that if you’re in the Quiet Car you must be very very very quiet. We don’t want any drama in the Quiet Car today.’
******************************************
UD‘s on an Acela train back to Garrett Park, Maryland, Land of Downed Trees.
The benighted University of Hawaii – a bad school with a bad football team that’s always getting arrested (background here) – rigged up a Stevie Wonder concert to benefit athletics…
No one told Stevie Wonder, however.
The university spent $200,000 to organize the concert, however.
The university isn’t sure who it gave the money to, however.
It’s trying to get the money back. But it doesn’t remember who it gave it to.
The University of Hawaii. Isn’t she lovely?
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
The problem with vehement, outraged post-Freeh Report opinion pieces like this one, which breathlessly recounts the excruciating filth of university football in this country, is that these pieces — we’ll see tons of them in the next forty-eight hours — are simply little system flushes, little emetics, little confessionals, for the very sports guys who’ve happily been covering the game for years. I hope they feel better now. But tomorrow they’ll be back at it, back playing the game that they love as much as Paterno’s happy little North Koreans did. All for football! All for the Beloved Leader!