PSU

How even to write about something like this?

By now everyone not living under a rock has heard at least the very basic allegations that have rocked Penn State. Yesterday, for the first time, I finally sat and actually read the grand jury investigative report. Before that, I'd read some summaries of it contained in various news/sports pieces on the subject. I even started to look up some of the statutes in question in the Pennsylvania criminal code but abandoned that task fairly quickly, as I found that one state's byzantine criminal code at a time is quite enough for my brain. I thought for a while before writing anything--in fact, starting a piece yesterday which I eventually deleted. It's frankly been a little difficult for me to know what to say.

Literally hundreds of writers, columnists, journalists, and sports commentators have weighed in on this subject. Compound that with the hundreds of thousands of other "Reader Comments" to newspapers, callers to radio shows, and comments on Facebook, and at some point you start to feel there's nothing more anyone can add. My husband and I have talked about this horrible scandal a number of times, and we've each got some different perspectives on this whole thing. Not different opinions, I don't think, but different perspectives. I'm going to try to write about those, rather than going on about how very awful it is that someone walked in on a child rape and didn't stop it, or speculating about Joe Paterno's legacy. I don't at the moment care about Joe Paterno's legacy, though there are people (a dwindling minority at the moment) who do. And with respect to what else I'm going to say, I want to be very careful. If I don't spend all my time emphasizing how terrible the crime was and what awful fallout it's going to have for the victims and their families, please understand that it isn't because I think those things are secondary. I don't. They're most assuredly primary. It's just that there have already been many, many pieces in the past week speaking to the fury and damage that this horrible crime causes, with more to say on the subject than what I can offer. Likewise, the subject of how badly the Penn State officials mishandled this whole thing has been pretty well covered beyond my ability to articulate anything else. With that, here goes.

First, I don't know anyone who thinks Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant who witnessed the 2002 incident of a still-unknown boy being anally raped in the shower, did the right thing. He saw something unspeakable, panicked, and fled, and then tried later (when it was too late to help the boy in question) to do something within the confines of respecting the system he worked in. The fact that he didn't just keep what he saw to himself obviously says that he knew he had to do something. But he made the bad judgment call to treat this as a football program matter rather than a criminal, public safety matter. I suspect that in his own mind he was trying after the fact to do the right thing, but the fundamental problem was that he made his attempts while trying first and foremost to protect his job and the system of which he was a part. He didn't protect that boy, but tried to protect his job and his program. And in the end he is almost certainly going to lose his job (and the prospects of getting another any time soon) anyway, and the program is in shambles and will be for a while. That's far secondary to what happened to the kids, without question. But even within what he probably was trying to do, he obviously failed.

But I would also point out that McQueary wasn't the only adult who witnessed Sandusky committing an assault on a child. Two years earlier, a janitor (who by now suffers from dementia and can't testify) reportedly saw Sandusky orally assaulting an 11-13 year old boy in the shower as well. He also did not call the police. He was distraught and told his supervisor, who actually feared the man would have a heart attack. The supervisor told him who he should report the matter to if he chose to report it, which he never did. But the entire janitorial staff was afraid that if they reported such a thing (particularly when they didn't personally witness it), they would lose their jobs. So even people not directly connected to the football program, people who may not have known who the perpetrator was, were afraid to do anything. I've not seen nearly the attention (or rage) directed at the janitorial staff that I have directed at Mike McQueary and the football staff. Is the janitor a more sympathetic figure than McQueary? I'm sure he was probably living a lot closer to the poverty line, and the loss of a job is a pretty scary thing. But in his own department, he did the same thing Mike McQueary did. And his supervisor didn't report the crime, either. It's not anyone's finest hour when they're more concerned about their own job than the safety of an anonymous child, but it also says something damning that they felt they had to be afraid for their jobs in the first place.

My husband has been looking at this from the perspective of someone in a semi-administrative position on a university campus, since he's currently chair of his department. It's had him somewhat discombobulated since the news hit. He's tried to put himself in the situation of what would happen if somebody reported something like that to him, and it's a pretty unpleasant place to put yourself. But since he's department chair, it's conceivable that some day a graduate student might witness someone in an authority position doing something illegal, freak out, and tell my husband. He then is Joe Paterno in that situation, if you will. Except that he's not. My husband is a great guy but he's not an icon or an institution, not the face of his university for the past 50 years (for damn sure doesn't get Big 10 football head coach pay). So it is a little hard to compare the two exactly.

As University faculty himself, my husband has also been thinking in terms of how this affects Penn State going forward. Less than a week after these allegations became public, the Board of Trustees of a major, big-time university voted to fire both its president and its resident legend. That's pretty seismic. And it's unrealistic to think it ends there. How will this affect the university as a whole? Will the number of student applications go down? Will there be a drop in enrollment? If so, will that lead to reductions in revenue? If so, will that lead to staff layoffs or tuition increases? And it's not very hard to imagine the state legislature in Pennsylvania holding a bunch of hearings over this, with administration being hauled in for testimony after testimony, with representatives looking for air time getting a chance to yell at them for the camera.

I've also been thinking about the Penn State students, because as it happens, I know a girl who's a freshman there this year. She's a fantastic kid. Abra and Thalia's most frequent babysitter until this year, in fact. She's in the marching band, and as of this writing planning a major in music education. She's just trying to get through her freshman year and do well in classes, but of course a big part of being in the marching band is you're connected to your marquee athletic teams. So this is affecting her, too, as well as thousands of other students. I just can't imagine being some nice kid from Cleveland off to her first semester at college, having a lot of your academic and social life be at least somewhat attached to the football team--and having this happen. I'm sure she'll do the best job she can keeping it together and focusing on the academic tasks at hand, but it has to be injecting a lot of added tension to the already-stressful situation of her first semester away at school.

As for me and my own perspective, it's a bit of an occupational hazard that whenever a high-profile crime hits the airwaves I always think about the people collateral to the accused. I think about how the lawyers might defend the case. The lawyers for the university officials charged with perjury might or might not have a decent defense--sounds pretty he said/she said in terms of who was told exactly what and when, and of course one of them is charged with perjury because the grand jury found one person's version more believable than another's. That tends to be a tough, though not impossible, sell when it's time for trial. Sandusky's lawyer is obviously in for a very long haul and might even get some crackpot death threats, too. And Sandusky has six grown children. How on earth do you live with your dad being dragged in front of TV cameras and being American's Most Notorious Child Rapist? Just unspeakably awful. Dozens and dozens of lives are being destroyed by this, and thousands more (in the form of current students and university employees) are being adversely affected.

I don't know what's going to happen out of all of this. It's all just overwhelming, surreal, and tragic.