What is the humane way to hold Penn State accountable for its complicity in the crimes of Jerry Sandusky? One can begin, perhaps, by reclaiming the word “humane,” one of the many things degraded and twisted in the scandal. “Humane” was the word that Graham Spanier, the president of the university; Tim Curley, the athletic director; and Gary Schultz, the vice-president for business and finance, tossed to each other in a series of e-mails, in 2001, in which they collapsed morally after a tap from Joe Paterno, the football coach. They’d thought about telling someone who could actually do something about evidence that Sandusky had raped a child in a locker-room shower, but, after Curley conveyed Paterno’s doubts, “humane” is what they told each other it would be if they had a quiet word with Sandusky instead. (They never spoke to the child, or found out who he was.) A space alien, reading their e-mails, might conclude that “humane” meant cowardly, or callous, or conveniently craven, or sympathetic only to those in one’s own social or professional circle. Really, it means the opposite. It means not only considering what others might say or think of you, or whether they will yell or complain, but about the values that make other people worth worrying about—the shared humanity.
That brings us back to what should happen to Penn State now, and what is being referred to as the “death penalty.” This is another phrase that is oddly out of proportion. It means that there would be no football team sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletics Association, not forever but for a couple of years. That Penn State ever got to the point where that could be talked about as the ultimate punishment—something like dying—is part of the problem. The Freeh report on the scandal demonstrated not only silence on the part of administrators but enabling so reckless that it might be called connivance, and it pointed to a reason: the way the football program acted as a massive distortion field. It scrambled the university’s reasoning—culturally, financially, and morally.
There is now a debate about whether the statue of Joe Paterno on campus should be taken down. Isn’t the stranger thing that it was put up in the first place, while he was still going to work, still coaching games? How do you manage an icon like that, and how do you say no when he says that he doesn’t think that calling the child-protective authorities is a good idea? At Penn State, the university president didn’t. If there are still so many alumni who love Paterno unabatedly, perhaps they can pool the money to buy the statue and cart it away, and let the university use the proceeds to help settle the many civil judgments it will surely have to pay.
Would that be enough? The question now is whether it is fair—whether it is humane—for anyone other than the complicit administrators to pay a price. The argument is that if Penn State has to do without football the ones who will suffer will be the players with scholarships, the hotel owners in Happy Valley, and all the little sports that have grown at Penn State in football’s shadow. What did they ever do wrong?
There is an unintentional irony in this argument. It is precisely the one that Sandusky traded on: the assumption is that the money football brings is the decisive factor in figuring out not only what is best for the university but what is right and what is wrong. Was Spanier also thinking of the hotel owners? Perhaps, in the future, his successor will recognize the costs of not saying something. So will the many people, at all levels, of the sort who saw Sandusky in strange circumstances with children, and let it go with an uncomfortable blink. There is more than one way to hurt a student athlete. One is to implicate him in a corrupt system in which neither his ethical or practical education is the main goal, and the other is to take away a scholarship (one that doesn’t even come close to compensating him for the money he makes for his school—but that’s another issue--one that played a role the last time a major program got the death penalty, in 1987).
This is not to dismiss the real, genuine hurt that can be done to a young person who loses an opportunity like this. But the material harm can be remedied more easily than the spiritual one in this case. For example, the N.C.A.A. and various athletic conferences can facilitate transfers; they can, as some commentators have suggested, give displaced Penn State athletes an extra year of eligibility; and they can allow the universities that take them to offer additional scholarships, so that there is no ripple effect. The N.C.A.A., as its president recognized in an interview with Tavis Smiley this week, does have a role, as long as Penn State wants to keep presenting its football team as something governed by the university, rather than the other way around. (And, as Joe Nocera pointed out in the Times, it has taken harsh action over infractions that are far more minor.)
It is also an insult to Penn State to act as though football were the only way it was or ever would be able to find to draw people to the school. There are other ways the university is great; time away from football might be a reminder of that.
Football is a game of wonders; the experience of a young person learning and growing and playing sports is entrancing, too; it can have undeniable, and positive, value in one’s moral development. It can teach a person to be humane, just as athletics can be part of the humanistic mission of a great university. But sympathy is not the same as surrender. Penn State football ought to be given what is called the death penalty, if it wants to find a new life.
Photograph by Gene J. Puskar/AP.
