I was a little skeptical when I read Michael Bérubé’s op-ed in The New York Times the other day about Joe Paterno. He wrote that “Penn State faculty members were permitted to feel less conflicted about the school’s football program than our counterparts elsewhere; we took pride in the fact that the school had never run afoul of the N.C.A.A. and that its football coach benched star players for missing class. Now we are in shock.”
In shock? Really? Except when it comes to making sure players don’t receive any money from recruiters, the NCAA is a keystone cops organization that is mainly concerned with its own bottom line. If Bérubé is really going to suggest that he and his colleagues felt satisfied because the school hadn’t run afoul of the NCAA, then his argument in the column in favor of greater faculty governance as a solution to Penn State’s problems seems pretty laughable.
Maybe Paterno is as committed to Penn State’s academic side as Bérubé claims; maybe he’s the kind of guy who sits around chatting about Moby Dick and Virgil with colleagues and punishing players who don’t do well in their classes. But I can’t say I was entirely surprised to read in The Wall Street Journal this morning that Paterno had a history of trying to sweep his players’ disciplinary problems under the table. Vicky Triponey, the university’s standards and conduct officer, complained
that Mr. Paterno believed she should have “no interest, (or business) holding our football players accountable to our community standards. The Coach is insistent he knows best how to discipline his players…and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should NOT be our concern…and I think he was saying we should treat football players different from other students in this regard.”
In this one article we learn Paterno let a player into a bowl game after he had been charged with sexual assault and suspended from school, of an occasion on which his defensive line broke into another student’s apartment and started beating other kids with barstools and beer bottles. At least one student was beaten even after he fell unconscious. No players were forced to miss any games. Paterno did make them help clean up after home games that fall. What is this? Fourth grade?
As I said, none of this is particularly shocking to anyone remotely aware of how Division I athletes are treated and how much power their coaches wield. Maybe there are exceptions, but Joe Paterno and his football players were not among them.
