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.