Stein Sells

The important question that needs to be answered is “did Spanier and Paterno know that there was a report that Sandusky was observed by a graduate student molesting a minor?”  If they were informed, even after the fact, and did not report this to the authorities for thorough investigation, then they should be dismissed, even if there are not prosecutable criminal offenses.  Molesting a minor is not a trivial infraction that can be swept under the rug in order to protect a football program, even at the mighty Penn State.  It is difficult to believe that something this serious managed to escape the incredibly leaky academic grape vine at Penn State, and only now emerges at a much later date.  It stretches one’s credulity that the top level people could even begin to claim “plausible deniability.”  No wonder the Penn State board is upset- this is a terrible blemish on their reputation, and if they try the same stonewalling “rope-a-dope” that the president tried, they will be hung out to dry as well.

It’s hard not to react with disgust to this situation.  Once you read the attorney general’s report, the depth of the depravity and scope of Sandusky’s behavior hits like a freight train.  This is a very sick man and everyone who actively or passively protected him needs to go.

Turning over a CEO, CFO and head football coach at an institution known for its football program will be a major institutional shake-up.  No doubt there’s very little else being talked about on campus.  The bigger they are….

Another question to ask is, did Paterno and Spanier know about the campus police report filed in 1998 detailing an incident at that time for which Sandusky apologized to the mother of the victim. And assuming they did (as it is extremely difficult to believe they did not, as Sandusky was then still a PSU employee), would not a further incident in 2002 have raised a red flag for them and led them to do much more than they did at that time? It should have been clear by 2002 that there was a pattern of behavior here that necessitated doing more than sweeping it under the rug.

Looks like some at Penn State are heading to State Pen.

It would appear that Spanier has to go for committing the one unpardonable presidential sin:  He allowed his Board to be blindsided.  There’s no excuse for that.

Paterno’s case is less clear, and I don’t think there is enough information available yet to draw firm conclusions.  I’m no Paterno fan; but if he told his supervisor everything he knew as soon as he heard it, as some reports suggest, then he had a right to expect that his supervisor would pass the information to the proper authorities and see that proper steps were taken.  Paterno is, after all, a football coach, not university general counsel.  That said, Paterno also has a moral obligation to follow up later and ask for reassurance that the matter was being dealt with appropriately.  We do not at present have enough information to draw accurate conclusions.  I hope that the Board will ask very specific questions and then take firm action based on the facts,not on reputation or popularity.

Have to be a little careful here.  The assistant should have told Paterno and the cops.  He was a witness.  Paterno should have told the assistant to tell the cops (we don’t know whether he did) and Paterno should have told the AD, which he did.  But if Paterno had gone to the cops based just on hearsay, and if the allegations had turned out to be false, then Paterno could have been charged with defamation.  I hate to be put in a position of defending Paterno, and I don’t mean to defend him.  But I do think we should suspend judgment on the degree of his culpability until more facts come out.

What a number of people have missed, as you’ve pointed out, is the very distinct difference between a legal and moral obligation.

Here’s the bottom line: at Penn State, Joe Paterno is probably the most powerful man on campus. He may not admit that publicly, but it’s most certainly the case. (This is not unique to Penn State, naturally)

Do people not believe that, had Paterno taken a more active role in the issue, that it could have been stopped sooner? You think, if Joe Paterno had called the Pennsylvania State Police and said, “I’ve just had a member of my staff tell me something incredibly sick and disturbing” that it would have mattered that he didn’t follow letter-of-the-law protocol? This is a living legend who heard about the kind of acts that our society is uniformly appalled by. Paterno’s apparent lack of response is staggeringly disappointing

A portion of the inertia in this story is based on whether Paterno acted or did not act appropriately. Lesson learned from this highly visible case:  universities should unequivocally state in handbooks and policies and codes of conduct: if a criminal activity is reported to you, call the police. Period. The law can deal with the legality and the university has eliminated any doubt or culpability.

I’ve been in a somewhat analogous position.  I once had a student come to me and allege that to her certain knowledge another student was dealing drugs on campus.  I urged her to call the police, and I also called to police to ask for guidance.  The police made it very clear that they did not want to hear from me.  They had to hear directly from the witness.  They also made it clear that they did not want any names from me.  For one thing, I would have been defaming the named student if the allegations were untrue.  Of course, I have never been a campus legend.  But however great Paterno’s moral obligation, he had also to be careful how he carried out that obligation.  Once again, we just don’t have enough information to draw firm conclusions about Paterno.  I do think the Board can get the necessary information, and I hope they get it and act on it properly and firmly.

Yes — this has been the talk of Centre Co. for months.  The board’s claim of being blindsided is puzzling, unless they mean “humiliated,” but the stage was set for that to happen long ago.  

Paterno’s age makes him more vulnerable than he would be otherwise.

The dominant tone of the dozens of reports I’ve read is outrage, and that’s understandable.  But these stories are not conveying the very deep sense of betrayal felt on campus and in town.

The idea that the sports department dictates university policy is scary. The incoming president for the University of Alabam tied his salary to $1.00 more than Bear Bryant.

Paterno has a history of supporting his coaches rather than students. For years he supported Rene Portland, who reworked scholarships if she thought a woman basketball player was a lesbian. Despite numerous complaints, and defections to other schools, he supported her.

He may be the winningest coach in the league, but he’s not the child and student friendliest.

I went to Penn State. Being a “Penn Stater” has been an enormous part of my identity for a log time. I am so perplexed by what has occurred, and everyday new information makes it harder and harder to maintain my faith in what had always been regarded as such a “morally” run football program. I just really hope that the students who are on the main campus right now are able to hold their heads up high and focus on their studies. I can only imagine what this must be doing to them.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from many of these sex abuse stories is that large, powerful institutions, including not only the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts but also colleges and universities, are extraordinarily bad at policing themselves. That is why law enforcement should always be involved, automatically and as a matter of course. Administrators and coaches — who are professionally and financially invested in the reputation of a school — do not, and should not, have any latitude in deciding which issues are worth investigating.

Why does Paul Hanstedt so believe in the liberal arts openness of his American peers?

The liberal arts might indeed help more in Hong Kong, or across Asia, for young professionals to fit their careers into the perspectives of wider communities, and the environment.  But what if the so-called American liberal arts mostly themselves inhabited “departments” that turn a blind eye on each other? — that don’t invite the literacy and the humanity of wider perspectives?

Nice going, Paul — thou doth so sweetly flatter thyself and thy peers.

As an expatriate Canadian who has worked in Hong Kong for over 7 years, I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head, Paul, when you talked about both the concepts of the need in Asia for real structure, (hence we have ‘policies related to policies with associated guidelines, etc’) as well as the acquiescence of Asian academic staff to go along with whatever the next ‘new thing’ (they grumble amongst trusted colleagues but would seldom voice a negative opinion publicly).  As a middle manager, as I once was here, these concepts made the job of managing staff very challenging, particularly if you tended to take things at face value (as one would tend to do especially early on in the job).  One might take silence for agreement and support only to find out later that staff were just going along, waiting for a change in leadership that they hoped would represent a return to the possibly outdated status quo.

i appreciate particularly the word “support” in the article’s antepenultimate paragraph: administrators exist to support.  Often, both they and those “under” them lose the support concept, mistaking for it a sense of arbitration or rank arbitrariness that forgets what their most serious function is: to facilitate smooth coordination of highly intelligent processes not always fully attuned to one another.  I wonder if we don’t also have a basic difference among faculties in western vs. eastern universities: the former were mostly educated under some sort of “distributional requirement” system, providing at least the most basic experience with the benefits of broad-scoped learning. 

Certainly the kind of administrative managing that proactively provides room in faculty workloads for any committee assignemnts makes sense; however, any administration that refuses schedule space for such efforts tacitly undermines them.  We can slso imangine policies on campuses that exclude some of the remarkable minds that have shaped the conversation about liberal arts–but such exclusions deny the seriousness of the pursuit.  We may have entered an era when the administrator who holds a position through the respect or even reverence for high scholarship and understanding of broad academic principles has past.  If so, that is our collective loss.  Without those figures on campuses, we have to hope that administrators understand the principle of support; rather than arbitration. “Goldilocks” may offer a comfortable concept, but the “perfect” degree of administtrative interference in academic process still lies in providing support rather than in choosing direction.

elie_s_dad, thank you for your points. The scenario that you describe seems to have been more a Wall Street phenomenon.  Having UK grads go to Wall Street, US Management Consulting firms or other foreign employers doesn’t really help the UK taxpayer. One of the early spurs for the move of physicists was one of the cycles of Ph.D. gluts and downsizing of US research, especially with end of the Cold War, the downsizing of US government labs, the downsizing of US corporate research (IBM, AT&T and others) and the killing of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993.

The former South African, Emanuel Derman went from Feynman Diagrams to Financial Engineer in a process that he partly describes in his book “Models Behaving Badly.”   But in those cases you’d expect them to be getting somewhat more than £35,000 a year, don’t you think, which would qualify in one of my metrics above.  

An open question about the Royal Society report is what is meant by “non-Science” jobs.  If like Derman you apply mathematical, statistical and physics tools and methodologies, you are doing something different than if you are a currency trader or a bond salesperson.  

In your own case of applied math, I would count you as having a Science job if you use part of your applied math tools, methodologies or techniques even if you are working managing quality control at a factory using Statistical Process Control techniques or using Operations Research techniques to improve productivity/production etc. There is no problem with using Science in Industry (though I would think you would be best off doing starting that at the Masters level or earlier) or doing research in Industry.  I don’t know how the Royal Society counted or defined non-Science jobs.

The £35,000 threshold is a crude, one dimensional metric, but it does reveal something, in addition to being government blessed number that will be applied to others.

It is very telling that “The government has responded to the concerns… by exempting PhD-level jobs from the new pay threshold for settlement.”  It is especially interesting that they appear to set NO threshold, which implies there is no limit to how low you can pay a Ph.D. in the UK.  It seems designed to ensure lots of low-cost foreign competition from non-UK citizens who could have graduated from Cambridge or Oxford with a Ph.D.