I'm for shutting it down. You wildly overestimate things however. I don't think you know how inbred and embedded things are. Read Michael Berube's article in the NYT (it';s the only one who wrote) to realize the stakes are much bigger than football.
Realize that PSU gets 4% of budget support from the state, that there is a proposed 50% cut in the works, that Spanier and PSU have fended off a hundred million dollar shale gas institute, that there have been fight-to-the-death political battles over these issues between the educators and the BOT, that whole institutions such as PSU-Altoona have been threatened with shutdown. You think football is going to change a many billions of dollar problem with repercussions into political and business spheres throughout the state. I disagree.
Uh, no. I don't think they'll be able to fix it. I think there is going to be a massive fight. The fact is, because of the kind of secrecy that comes into play when you weigh criminal allegations against worker's rights, there is always going to be a hushed approach to criminal matters. The only question is, how wide is the circuit and who has oversight? The BOT or the faculty? How much input do the lawyers have? I have said this to you repeatedly but it wasn't only Paterno who made the call, but Spanier, and his lawyers, and even a medical doctor who was a mandatory reporter. Clearly, we need people who are not so interested in the university's liabilities involved (the doctor is the only one who doesn't fit the profile of people concerned with the university's bottom line). I think there is huge potential is having a power-sharing arrangement go awry here, but I think the way things have gone, if they make this solely into a football issue (which I do not believe it is as I stated time and time again, esp. given Spanier's pattern of behavior with previous incidents of child abuse), then the pressure to have oversight conducted by more impartial members of the community will dissipate. And you may get something even worse than what you started with.
The only good part of this so far is that all university employees are required to report allegations of child abuse to police immediately, no matter how much craziness that might entail in terms of worker rights. That much is clear. As to how the university then handles such matters, that's totally up in the air.
I think I"m finally starting to get somewhere with you. We agree that things at Penn State are so far gone with at least the culture of the leadership, that major change is necessary. WE simply disagree on how to create that change.
Bravo upstater. Bravo. You're one of the first PSU people I've seen clearly admit, that shutting down the football program is something you favor.
SHutting down the football program, I think, will have a much, much greater impact than I think you do, and we disagree there. I think that the issues you bring up over funding, research projects, industrial commerce and interaction of academic institutions, existed before penn state football, and they'll continue to exist after penn state football, and starting the penn state football program from scratch after a year off, is exactly the kind of method that would be highly effective to generate the public pressure for that culture of the leadership to change dramatically in all those other directions you mention......
, b/c the culture of a community's leadership, will never change, unless the culture that leadership represents, demands it, and unfortunately, all the "important" things you mention, taht are absolutely more important than football, in our society,even beyond Penn State, are less important to the public masses opinion, than entertainment, and football is entertainment.
SHould all the things you mention, (shale deals, funding, closing branches, etc.) matter more than football? Absolutely yes. But you have to ask yourself, in reality, to the general populace? What matters more football? Or all that?
Grantland writer wrote a good piece about it today. read it, if you haven't. The grand experiment, at penn state, with athletics driving academics, and vice versa.... was doing very well, but had a fatal flaw, and it's now completely corrupt, but the balance between academics and athletics, is not something that should be scrapped, you learn from it.
the failure at penn state, was to properly educate everyone in the administration and athletic departments, and also academics about properly reporting crime after the Clery LAW was enacted for universities in the entire country. Had anyone in that institution, been properly instructed in how to report a dangerous criminal like Sandusky, as early as 1991, as it should have happened, then the most powerful people in the college, whould have themselves been educated on how dangerous it was to handle Sandusky the way they chose to.
The people in charge, in 1991, chose not to be properly instructed, and for that, I trully fear, that among all the other things that we now KNOW Sandusky did, because they chose to handle a child predator in that way, that in addition, my guess, is that had they been instructed properly in how to handle a criminal behavior of that nature, years before, when it was mandated by federal law........a child is also dead at his hands, but we will never know that to be true or not.
It's awful. God awful. People had faith that Penn State leadership knew what to do. Penn State leadership always did what was right. In this case, they did not, and consequences are awful.
Penn state can continue that grand experiment - but it's going to take breaking down to the groudn and starting over, and applying lessons learned.
That's what you do when an entire experiment is contaminated. You scrap it all, and start again, and apply what you've learned.
