In the week or so since Jerry Sandusky was arrested for violations that don't need rehearsing here, Penn State officials have been under the microscope. In particular, Joe Paterno, the revered coach of Penn State's football team and apparent icon of moral righteousness, has been castigated for his inaction after learning in 2002 that an assistant coach witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room showers. Paterno claims that he “referred the matter to university administrators,” but he didn't call the police, he didn't follow up with the people to whom he reported the matter, and he seems to have put the whole sordid situation out of his mind. This week, he paid for his inaction by being unceremoniously relieved of his position after 46 years as head coach.
A common refrain among commentators in the past week has been, "How could they let this happen?" The answer that seems to be emerging, especially in light of what looks like widespread covering up of Sandusky's crimes, is that Penn State officials and others were determined to protect the power and prestige of the school and its football program at the cost of failing to protect Sandusky's victims. In a number of commentaries, Paterno is painted as a power-monger, a back-room politician, an arrogant egotist, interested only in keeping his iron-grip on the football program. It is suggested that he knew Sandusky was raping children and simply cared more about his program than he did about children. Why else, asks ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, "didn't Paterno contact the police when first informed in 2002 by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary of an alleged locker room incident involving Sandusky and a young boy?"
Wojciechowski's question invites a more thoughtful answer than much of the torch-and-pitchfork analysis of the past week has allowed. I want to state unequivocally here that I have no intention of excusing Paterno's behavior or inaction. He owed everyone, especially the victims, better. And I'm not interested in arguing that his firing was wrong--honestly, I have no skin in that game. But, I have been really rather disturbed by the reaction I’ve witnessed because of the anger directed at Paterno. Not that he’s without blame, but I’ve heard far more anger directed at Paterno than I have at Sandusky. Sandusky, it seems, is just some pathetic pervert, while Paterno is the real villain.
I want to grant Paterno a modicum of humanity. However arrogant and egotistical Paterno may be, and whatever power he exercised at Penn State, (Wojciechowski says "often vast and overpowering") I imagine that Paterno must also have experienced an awful lot of fear when he learned of Sandusky's violations. Nothing that I’ve read has been willing to grant Paterno that fear in any kind of real way, and I think it’s worth considering.
The fear that I'm talking about may well include the fear of damage to the football program. After all, Paterno was Penn State football. Penn State football was his identity, and as any rhetorician worth their salt can tell you, there is an incredible, often irrational, kind of fear that accompanies any threat to a person's identity. That's why people often hold tight to ideological commitments even after they've been logically and empirically disproved. But even beyond the fear of damaging the football program, Paterno had an awful lot to be fearful of. For one, I'm sure he feared losing Sandusky's friendship. Paterno had known Sandusky for at least 39 years by 2002. They'd worked together as coaches for more than 30. It may sound stupid to fear losing a child rapist's friendship, and rationally it is. But when you've known someone, especially someone you consider a close friend, for decades, it's hard to turn on that person, even in the face of horrible, disgusting acts. You don't want to see your friends humiliated and punished, even when you know they deserve to be.
The loss of Sandusky's friendship is just the tip of the iceberg. If Paterno thought consciously about things he feared, he probably thought about losing his own job. By 2002, they'd coached for 33 years together. Certainly questions that have come up this week would have come up then. Among them, "How could Paterno not know Sandusky was a predator after working with the man for 33 years?" After all, how can you be intimately involved in everything having to do with Penn State football and not know that your assistant coach and heir apparent is a pederast? If Paterno was in the considering mood, he would have considered the possibility that he'd face serious scrutiny from university officials and the public that might have cost him his job.
Paterno might also have feared misrepresenting, and thereby ruining, Sandusky. After all, allegations of sexual misconduct can ruin a person's life, even if that person is innocent (The McCuan-Kniffen case from the 1980s is one of the more famous and sensational examples). I imagine for someone in Paterno's position, there is always the fear, probably rarely acknowledged aloud, that a disgruntled student or colleague will level false accusations about sexual misconduct as a way to get even for some perceived slight. That fear, I might add, is fairly common among men who hold positions of power, even when that power is relatively minimal. It may very well be irrational, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And I'm sure it crossed Paterno's mind that his actions could contribute to just such a situation.
What seems most likely to me, however, is that Paterno experienced a deep and abiding fear that was both indeterminate and inchoate. The kind of fear that small children feel when they're lying in bed at night. Something unnamed, but very-deeply felt. Except unlike the fear of a bogey monster, the fear I imagine Paterno felt was that everything he knew about his life and believed about himself would be slowly (or quickly) unraveled.
None of these fears justifies doing nothing. But the strain of moral damnation in newspaper articles and blog posts that elicited Paterno's removal suggests that he was malicious and uncaring, driven only by power and prestige. I don't doubt that there was an element of unacceptable self-preservation involved in his decision to “refer the matter to university administrators,” but we would have to accept that he's a monster on par with, even perhaps worse than, Sandusky to accept the characterization of Paterno as full-aware and still completely callous. The fact that he reported it up the chain of command weakens this reading, even if it doesn’t completely undercut it.
If you're still with me, you might be worried that I want here to let Old JoePa off the hook because he looked fear in the face and took some action. He may not have done enough; but he didn't exactly do nothing. I don't want to let him off the hook. But I do want to consider that his fear is indicative of a systematic failure as much as it is a personal one. To put it a different way, whether or not Paterno actually experienced the fears I introduced above, it's not hard to imagine that he did. Fear is indicative of the culture we live in, particularly where there are entrenched systems of power. Indiscretions (or crimes) are routinely covered up for financial and political gain. The examples are too copious to begin naming. Confronting those systems, most of which sustain the lives we live, the jobs we have, and the communities of which we're a part, is to risk being exiled by family, friends, and employers.
It's hard enough when the accuser is also a victim because of how injury is heaped on injury. To take a prominent example, in a recent “news” story about one of Herman Cain's accusers, the "journalist" speculated about the fact that this woman had filed sexual harassment charges at another job she'd held. The unstated verdict: gold digger. Suddenly, she's under as much scrutiny as Cain. This is not an isolated example. Bill O'Reilly famously noted that abductee, Shawn Hornbeck, found things to like about his imprisonment by Michael Devlin. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of harassment, she was all but accused of being a whore. And, rape victims are routinely accused of "asking for it" by the authorities to whom they report, especially when the alleged rapist is rich, famous, or both. It is no surprise that many victims of one kind of abuse or another choose never to report it. But victims who do report can at least draw from their personal experience to help steel them in the arduous pursuit of justice.
For whistle blowers who aren't victims, like Paterno, the choice is much different. They generally do not have to live with the pain of having been victimized. As a result, their choice is whether to keep quiet or to subject oneself to the kind of pressures that accusers seem inevitably to face. Take for example, Thomas Tamm. He was a Department of Justice lawyer who reported NSA wiretapping during the Bush Administration. For his troubles, Tamm was subjected to a six-year FBI investigation, which continued even after it was widely acknowledged that the program was illegal. During that period, he spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, lost his job at the Department of Justice, and faced imprisonment at the hands of the government.
For people like Paterno and Tamm, the moral decision is clear. You report the crimes because it is the right thing to do. But faced with the available options, it's not hard to imagine that saving the football program is only a small part of the calculation involved in making such a decision. Paterno's silence, while shameful and immoral, is not entirely incomprehensible. His decision to keep his report in-house seems like an attempt to balance the two options available to him. He followed protocol and contented himself that he'd done the right thing and saved himself in the process. It turns out he was wrong on all counts.
All this points to an incredibly complicated situation that raises many more questions than it answers: How should we hold people accountable for turning in possible criminals? How do we begin to reconcile our moral duties with the fears of complete undoing? What does it mean to fulfill ones responsibilities when the people to whom you report are at liberty to forgo their own? In a culture that values everything (and I mean everything) as a potential asset, how do we protect children, and other people, from being coveted as things to “have”? How do we begin to unravel the unacceptable relationship between economic success and silence in the face of sickening crimes? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but they need to be asked, along with many other complicated ones. The real danger is in not asking these questions to begin with and being content with the punishments that have been, and will be, meted out.
Which brings me back to Paterno's ouster. I suppose what I find most disturbing about Paterno’s dismissal is the level of contentedness it seems to grant people. Paterno's dismissal (coupled with Sandusky's arrest) allows people to go back to believing that, now that the cancer has been excised from Happy Valley, things can return to normal. The evil has been purified from the system, the monster has been chased out of town. Except it hasn't. Sandusky's actions aren't the result of football; the cover-up isn't a failing that can be localized to central Pennsylvania; and JoePa's forced retirement doesn't solve a thing other than to soothe the seething mobs (with the exception of the rioters who turned out to support Paterno by destroying their beloved campus--they were apparently not soothed). Paterno is gone, Sandusky will most certainly end up in jail, but the system will roll on until the next shocking abuse of the system and the revelation of its cover-up demands that more heads roll (Even as I type this, I am reading an article about the Catholic Church’s lead investigator into child sex scandals being arrested for possessing troves of child pornography images). The Penn State tragedy isn't just that kids were harmed and the violator was protected; it's also that what happened in Penn State is part of our culture in a way that the tarring-and-feathering of all involved can't touch, much less solve.
