Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Trouble in Paradise

Several old friends have asked in their Christmas cards that I comment on what has been happening at Penn State from my vantage point. I will assume that you know the story in broad outline. Here goes:

Happy Valley is an idyllic place to live in many respects: beautiful, quiet but lively, progressive, affordable, neighborly, relatively safe. But no town is perfect. One T-shirt proclaims State College "A Drinking Town With A Football Problem". Sloshed students fall off balconies here. Football, which was the university's claim to fame and its mighty fundraising tool, has become equally problematic.

My chiropractor -- a short, muscular, ebullient young man with a large family to provide for -- bemoans what he sees approaching. The university, he thinks, will be sued by victims of child abuse and bled white. (It had already lost considerable funding thanks to the right-wing state administration.) Employees will be laid off. Local businesses will be impacted. And he will lose patients and income as a result.

Many citizens are likewise exercised by and talk endlessly about the scandal and its consequences. Some fear what will come, as the doctor does. Others are mainly outraged, because JoePa was booted out or because the school didn't stop Jerry Sandusky.

This had seemed a spot immune to time's ravages. Its institutions, not least of them Joe Paterno, continued all but unchanged through decade after decade. And suddenly things are in upheaval. People are disoriented and anxious.

Unless through some horrid twist of irony Sandusky committed none of the crimes he has been charged with, he should of course be locked away for life to keep people safe from him. He has a brilliant lawyer in Joseph Amendola. While other lawyers are shocked at the idea of putting a client in front of reporters lest what he says be used against him in court, Amendola has tried to humanize the reviled coach and raise questions about the certainty of his culpability. Nothing less than that, I believe, can begin to afford him a fair trial.

I am disturbed, as some also are, at the widespread readiness to declare Sandusky guilty. A jury is how we determine what happened, and the presumption of innocence should mean something if we take our system of justice seriously. Similarly, I was sorry to see Paterno, who for a lifetime served Penn State's interests wholeheartedly as much more than a mere football coach, fired over the phone at age 84 without so much as a chance to tell his side of the story. These are not things to be proud of. They bespeak an absence of the institutional wisdom, the ethical sensitivity, and the moral courage that should define a university and the town that reflects its influence.

Curley and Schultz, the university officials who have been charged with ignoring the activities of an exploiter of children and lying about it to the police, will also have their day in court. Should they be set free, the possibility of lawsuits against the university will erode if not evaporate. So a lot is at stake with their verdict.

The key witness against them, the youngish and plainly sincere Mike McQueary, has told what appear to be conflicting stories as to what he observed in a Penn State locker room. Going by what he testified to at the preliminary hearing, his squeamish unwillingness to use clear terms like "sodomy" and "sexual abuse" in recounting his experience to Paterno might have led the latter to downplay the importance of what he heard. Yet the response he attributes to Paterno, commencing with "I'm sorry you had to see something like that", suggests that he did grasp it.

Paterno, too, can hardly have been eager to talk about such a scene. He took it to his nominal superior, the athletic director Curley, who took it to president Graham Spanier. Spanier strikes me as being too bright and too ruthless to have put his position at risk by trying to cover up for a pederast. He maintained in his lone public statement that he was not told of a crime. (My chiropractor opines that the trustees may have ordered him to keep it quiet, but I doubt he would have told them about it before deciding for himself what to do.)

It looks to me as though there is a gray area around each of these successive communications that could open the way to an acquittal for Schultz and Curley.

Then there is the role played in all this by Pennsylvania's new governor, Tom Corbett. Earlier, as the state's elected attorney general who was running for his present office, he assigned but a single investigator to the Sandusky case. Not until he had moved up were seven additional investigators added to it. He did not warn the university or Sandusky's charity for young boys, The Second Mile, of what the coach was likely up to. He says that he could not have done so without alerting Sandusky and so compromising the investigation. Legal experts and other prosecutors dispute this, saying that such notifications are made routinely and that protecting the children should have come before anything else. A suspicion exists that Corbett did not want to upset his generous campaign donors from the greater Penn State community till after the election. If that is so, he is no better than those who have lost their jobs for what can plausibly be construed as callous indifference.

As for the university, how it handled the crisis previously may matter less than how it is handling it now. The main problem is the corporate culture of the place, which is closed-off and given to withholding information. There probably also is -- and it may be what brought down an omnipotent but not omniscient Spanier -- an element of "Papa don't want to hear no bad news." That would be a dangerous combination, inviting underlings to handle embarrassing situations according to their own discretion and from self-serving motives.

What is taking place? Ridding themselves of Spanier and Paterno as liabilities to the school's reputation and its money-raising, the trustees installed as temporary president the longtime vice president and provost, Rodney A. Erickson. Erickson looks like a university president and has issued such deft official utterances that they are being studied in one Penn State course!

The idea was at first that Rod would be only the interim chief. A nationwide search for an outstanding president was to be undertaken. Then, to my astonishment, the trustees announced that they were calling off the search and naming him to the position permanently! My first reaction was to wonder if he had something on someone? While that may be too cynical, I think they made a deplorable mistake. Erickson was the number two official in the discredited regime and its ways were not alien to him. He should nothave been entrusted with reforming the place unless he had shown a clear determination to do so. And that he has not done.

Now, I know nothing of what Erickson is like as a person. In exchanges with one old friend, I've kiddingly represented him as Rod the God, an empty suit and megalomaniac. I've invented for him regrettable deeds such as proclaiming The Erickson Era and ordering the dynamiting of the campus's JoePa shrine over fall break so that it could be replaced by a statue of himself in Napoleonic pose before the students returned.

Could he actually be that bad? Unfortunately, we will have to wait and see rather than dismiss the idea out of hand.

For under Rod's leadership, Penn State has already flunked the crucial test of whether it knows where it went wrong and is prepared to put matters right. When CNN requested the university's files pertaining to its awareness of the inconclusive 1998 investigation of Sandusky by the police and the district attorney's office, the reply was, in effect, "We do not have to give you that. We are a state-related school, not a state-owned one. We Are Penn State. Screw you. Have a nice day."

The use of pervasive secrecy for the sake of control, the top-down management style, and the implicit capacity to intimidate any employee who is not a "team player" are what made this disaster possible in the first place. Were a fully comparable situation to arise next week, there is no reason to suppose that it would be dealt with differently. Erickson speaks of "healing" when a reformer would speak of, and insist upon, the admitting of daylight and fresh air to locked corridors and privileged chambers.

For Penn State will not be adequate, let along exemplary, till it wants to reveal as much of its affairs as it reasonably can rather than as little. No one there should hesitate to call the police after witnessing a criminal act by a university honcho. When openness and accountability are the norms, the key lesson will have been learned. And, incidentally, only then can its level of support from alumni and Lions fans and the public be secure.

The hunt for a long-term president should take place after all. It should go on nation-wide and be highly demanding. That should be the prelude to a housecleaning and a new kind of administration. The prevailing spirit must not be one conducive to a cover-up but one that comprehends and establishes and cherishes and safeguards glasnost.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

WINNING WAYS

Winning an election may require the right person, not only the right issues in the right year. And personality traits may be what determines who the right person is.

What about prospective third-party progressive Rocky Anderson? Watching him on YouTube, my first impression was that he won't get far. He seemed strident and obsessive. He used abstractions like "militarism" and "corporatism", which most people don't use and may not grasp. He came across as talking to an in-group, not to all of us. He focused on impractical objectives such as impeaching Dubya. And he lacked the evidences of warmth, friendliness, and humility that could draw people to him who didn't agree with him, as Ronald Reagan excelled at doing.

Let's note in fairness, however, that in all that Rocky was being an activist, not a candidate. He must know how to get votes, as he nearly won a Congressional race in a conservative district without pulling in his horns and later was a very electable mayor of Salt Lake City (even receiving bi-partisan backing from the likes of Mitt Romney, then a personal friend). So not what he has said but what he will say and how he will say it -- and who he evidently is -- will let us figure what we can expect from him.

Even at his worst, Rocky could turn out to do far better than Ralph Nader did. In '00, '04, and '08 the Democratic nominee was not an incumbent and one could hope that he would do the right things if he got in office; but in '12 we know that we can expect nothing from the Democrat and that any reversal of our fortunes will require an outsider. And Rocky, facing Mr. Obama and the Republican, will have all the issues going for him, while they will be on the defensive in relation to him.

But does he have the natural assurance and easy authority to gain wide acceptance? Is he not only a fighter but a big enough person that people will want to follow him? I am skeptical about that but am willing to wait and see how he does when he declares his candidacy.

What should a candidate be like? It's said one mustn't be angry, as Rocky plainly is. I would amend that to say that one mustn't appear to be a congenitally wrathful person. I think that if one is mad about things that anyone ought to be mad about, the people will share the sentiment rather than being put off by it. I suspect that one reason so many Americans seem not to trust or understand President Obama is because he is unable or unwilling to display warranted and communicable anger.

If you want to see how to really get votes, look to the person I think could be the Dems' most effective '16 nominee. He is not New York's dour Andrew Cuomo or Maryland's smooth Martin O'Malley, who are the ones most discussed, but Montana's charismatic, larger-than-life Governor Brian Schweitzer, who is endlessly inventive and as far from Wall Street mentally as geographically.

Schweitzer is a rancher and scientist who has worked in the Middle East and knows how to negotiate with Bedouins (the one who reveals what he wants first is at a disadvantage). The first time he ran for office, he took elderly people to Canada by bus to buy prescription drugs there, where they are much cheaper, capturing the public's imagination; with that and similar tactics he nearly won a U.S. Senate seat despite long odds. Chasing the governorship, he came across as an unconventional and unpredictable common-sense liberal populist whose TV ads showed him hunting and who picked a moderate Republican, State Senator John Bohlinger, as his runningmate for lieutenant governor. But he is no sellout centrist. He boasts of having gotten through his legislature "the most progressive package in America", emphasizing the environment and education, and he has remained one of the nation's most popular governors while his party's fortunes have see-sawed.

If you want to see his style, check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr0Bkmq2oRE&feature=related.

In the case of Rocky Anderson, we can hope for the best: at least that he will make the case for what has to be done and may win many new adherents for it. In the case of Brian Schweitzer, well, 2016 will come eventually, and he has the kind of good energy that suggests to me that it may choose to carry him with it.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

ROCKY RUNS

Ross "Rocky" Anderson, a former two-term mayor of Salt Lake City and until this year a Democrat, will shortly announce a run for president of the United States as the candidate of what may be called the Justice party.

I like the way his name evokes Ross Perot, Nelson Rockefeller, and John Anderson, all of them against-the-grain fighters.

Anderson is 60. He has been active a long time and has gotten things done. Raised a Mormon, he is an independent thinker with an existentialist's vision of personal responsibility and so has been fearless and very consistent in advocating what he believes right and necessary. That embraces the convictions of the most liberal Democrats, the environmentalists, the exponents of human rights, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is a proven vote-getter as well as a prominent lawyer. His outspokennness has made him a minor national figure.

Getting on the ballot in all 50 states will not be easy but is not impossible.

I suppose the main question is whether Rocky has the vividness of personality and the forcefulness of mind and expression to dominate the discussion as opposed to only getting into it. Is he a protester or a leader? We will be finding out.

It appears that there will now indeed be a left alternative to the Obama regime, which Anderson has denounced as gutless and in some respects even more secretive and oppressive than the Bush one. For those of us who thought there was no chance of anything auspicious happening soon, this is heartening.

The worst possibility is that Anderson will do only well enough to elect the Republican. I would favor his offering Mr. Obama a deal whereby whichever of them was running behind the other a week before the election would withdraw and throw his backing to the other. I doubt we will see that, however.

We may now have at least the beginning of a new national politics consistent with the truly American vision of the Occupiers.

Here is what one prominent politician, who had worked with him on the Olympics, had to say about Rocky Anderson a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PQ95wokGlM&feature=related