I'm going to go out on a limb and put Lewis on hiatus for at least another few hours. If people really want to read more information about the child molestation scandal unfolding around former Penn State football assistant Jerry Sandusky, please go to ESPN.com. For those people that want to get a bit of summary and an interpretation of the events, continue reading.
My gut reaction to the revelations of Sandusky sexually abusing at-risk boys (single-parent households, low-income households, and so on) was to call for the man's head. The state of Pennsylvania does not have a death penalty as far as I know, so I imagine that Sandusky will be given a very lengthy prison sentence that will end with his death in a prison cell. So much for that.
Now on to the university: the board of trustees perhaps believes that the correct and immediate actions have been taken by firing Joe Paterno, Gary Schultz, Tim Curley, and Graham Spanier. I believe that the board of trustees has made a huge error, considering that all four of these men and the graduate assistant (at the time) Mike McQueary were probably not trained at all to know exactly what to do in the event that they witnessed or were informed about sexual abuse of children on campus property. Penn State is a massive higher education institution which serves young adults who are no longer considered minors for almost everything except the consumption of alcohol before the legal age of 21; knowledge of reporting and handling child abuse cases is mostly confined to the Education Department and the Social Services Department which train students to be teachers and social workers. After all, many child abuse cases are first discovered because a teacher or social worker in a K-12 school setting suspects that a child is being abused after seeing a significant change in the child's behavior corresponding with signs of physical trauma appearing on the student where the teacher or guidance counselor or social worker can document in writing what they have seen and observed.
None of the four fired men was trained to handle a child abuse case. I have been trained as a teacher to act on my suspicions of child abuse and immediately begin documenting evidence and reporting that evidence to school authorities, which will then require me to cooperate fully with authorities investigating the evidence and the reports from myself and others. With all regard to the trustees who have taken action and to the media who have done a very thorough job of covering this series of events, everyone is dead wrong. Paterno was a football coach, not a teacher or social worker. Curley and Schultz were university administrators, not men with education degrees trained to spot such things and follow up on their suspicions. Spanier was a university president charged with advocating for the university students, not fingering child molestors that were once part of the Penn State staff.
Not that any of this mattered to Sandusky, who set them all up to be fired in disgrace. The reaction by the board of trustees will haunt them whether they know it or not as the knee-jerk response it was. The reaction of many media personnel to vilify all four men fired rather than the man who committed the crimes is idiotic and hypocritical at best; I'm looking at you, Ivan Maisel, Lester Munson, Mark May, and Pat Forde. None of you have been trained to handle such a case, and you all would have made mistakes. Just like the human beings that you are.
Sandusky will be put in jail, the board of trustees will be viewed very negatively by alumni and students, and the media writers will hold their jobs (unfortunately). Am I falling for Paterno's cult of personality? No. I am reacting to the situation as someone seeing four firings as a very poor course of action in the absolute wrong direction.
Soooo...what happens now? Penn State will face Nebraska in their last home game of the season without two members of their coaching staff. After the season is over, who knows? Some folks have suggested (Munson) that Penn State's football program, indeed the entire athletics department, be scrapped for two years or more and started over from scratch. Quite a wonderful punishment to the hundreds of student-athletes and coaching staffs who had absolutely nothing to do with Sandusky at all, isn't it? Sheer idiocy on Munson's part, and if he has the guts, Lester Munson will contact me right now and explain to me how he can so boldly tell so many young athletes to give up the sports which they love so much and sustain their academic endeavours to become young professionals in a field other than athletics.
To all the writers saying "here's how it should have been handled and because the four men did not do so, they deserved to be punished", check your egos and do a lot of soul-searching. ANYONE can make the mistake Paterno did, since no one else suspected Sandusky of such atrocities either. That includes all media writers who may have interviewed him, and that includes the four above which I have mentioned and their peers. I certainly could have done the same thing in Paterno's shoes, or Curley's or Spanier's or Schultz's, even.
In the end, perhaps the strenth of the reaction and lashback is because Penn State is viewed as a place and institution where nothing may go so horribly wrong. That includes my own reaction, which is written in some measure here. I must conclude by stating that Penn State IS what Paterno and others who shared his vision wanted it to be: a university where the students and academics truly are important. Penn State will in fact not be tarnished from this scandal, and proper blame will be placed where it should be placed: at the feet of an old man who was never what he seemed, and sought to gratify only himself and his own selfish interests.
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