NCAA Fumbles Penn State Case
Why inflict punishments on the innocent for the failures of the guilty?
By William McGurn
The Wall Street Journal
July 23, 2012, 7:47 p.m. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443570904577545384018802236.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
The first clue to the cluelessness of the National Collegiate Athletic Association came during its press conference Monday morning in Indianapolis.
The chairman of the organization's executive committee, Ed Ray, explained the NCAA's sanctions on Penn State by invoking "the children." Minutes later NCAA President Mark Emmert took it to the next level of political correctness by declaring that the aim was a "change of culture." Indeed, Mr. Emmert invoked the word "culture" six times as he explained punishments that will largely be inflicted on the innocent for the failures of the guilty.
That's what we do these days. When someone does something truly evil—whether it be a gunman firing on innocents in a Colorado theater, or an assistant college football coach molesting young boys—we indict the larger culture. We see this in the wake of Colorado, where last week's shooting spree has fed calls to take away guns from the law-abiding. We see it too in reaction to the terrible happenings at Penn State, where Joe Paterno's name seems to arouse more fury than that of the man who actually molested the boys, Jerry Sandusky.
Maybe that's because we expected more from Paterno, whose slogan was "success with honor." Maybe it's because Sandusky was allowed in the Penn State facilities even after people saw him taking showers with naked young boys. In some senses, the urge to punish, and punish big, reflects a human desire to see justice done and an institution held accountable.
Hence the NCAA's assault on the Penn State culture. Under the just-announced sanctions, Penn State's football team will be banned from postseason play for four years, its football scholarships will be limited, and it will pay a year's worth of football revenue in fines, about $60 million. Even that wasn't good enough: The NCAA has also ordered all the Nittany Lion wins from 1998 to 2011 "vacated."
Now it's easy to say that the most powerful men at Penn State effectively provided Sandusky cover for his crimes, and in fact that is part of what former FBI Director Louis Freeh concludes in the investigation he carried out for Penn State's trustees. It's easy to believe, too, that these men were unduly motivated, as the report implies, by a desire not to incur the bad publicity that might harm a football brand bringing in millions each year.
The harder question to answer is as follows: Is the NCAA's emphasis on Penn State's "culture" part of the cure or part of the disease? Even if fixing the culture were the answer, is an association with as little credibility as the NCAA really the vehicle to deliver it?
How much better off we would be if we could address the real problem at State College—to wit, senior college officials, including Paterno, reluctant to take real responsibility for those under them. In this, surely, the culture at Penn State is far from unique. At most of our modern campuses, we've replaced leadership with codes, judgment with zero tolerance, and standards of right and wrong with Who Am I To Judge—and then we are shocked, shocked when scandal erupts.
At Hillsdale College, where this reporter has taught, President Larry Arnn says the increasing resort to complex codes deprives leaders of the discretion they need to make wise and fair decisions. "You can't write prudence and judgment into a code," says Mr. Arnn. "When a code tries to cover every possibility, it ends up shifting power from the college president and trustees to the compliance officers."
The argument for focusing on the larger culture over individual responsibility is that it will create a climate where a Sandusky could never again operate. Perhaps.
It's equally plausible, however, that the result will be new bouts of sensitivity training, new guidelines and regulations, and new compliance requirements that will allow leaders to insulate themselves from legal and financial liability by checking off boxes instead of resolving problems.
What an impoverished view of responsibility that would be. Then again, how in keeping it is with the multiplication of speech codes, sexual harassment codes, Title IX women's athletics codes and so forth that now substitute for leadership on so many campuses. Is this really what the most educated and enlightened members of our society have to offer our young people today?
In truth, the scandal at Penn State is only incidentally about football. Mostly it is about the collapse of authority. There was a day when our colleges held themselves to higher standards than the society around them. Today they look to police, the courts, and outside institutions such as the NCAA to do a job they are clearly unwilling or unable to do.
So the statue of Joe Paterno comes down. Amid the cheers, it might be worth giving more thought to what's going to replace it.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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