This past weekend we learned that former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was being charged with multiple counts of child molestation for incidents occurring over several years and involving various levels of child abuse, indecency and rape perpetrated on children as young as 10 years old. As shocking as this was, what was even more shocking was that the Penn State Athletic Director and a university Vice President were charged with failing to report these incidents several years earlier and perjury for lying to the grand jury about it.
What is most shocking about this incident, however, is not that these horrific actions occurred, but looking at the tendency of university administrators to cover up incidents such as these and stymie law enforcement in their efforts to investigate them, that they ever came to light at all.
Since my years in undergraduate study at Syracuse University I saw incident after incident after incident of rape and sexual assault covered up by university administrators and others in power at the university. In most cases, this appeared to be for the sole reason that if the facts of these cases were allowed to see the light of day, the university would be seen in a bad light and the University would do everything in their power to cover up these cases or find a way to blame the victim and excuse the behavior of the perpetrator. Rarely, if ever, were these incidents ever reported to the police or local non-campus legal authorities and rarely, if ever, did the university work with prosecutors once a report made its way through the labyrinthine university process to get attention from the local prosecutor's office. In fact, more often than not, the university's judicial process worked against the state's prosecutorial case often derailing an ongoing prosecution.
As awful as these incidents were on an everyday basis, the process became even worse when the allegations concerned an offender who was also an athlete or related in any way with the athletic program. Athletics for a university is big business. There were many attempts by the university to single out one group or another (usually fraternities and sororities) for discipline and restrictions in the name of greater campus safety and fighting sexual assault, sometimes deserved, often not deserved. But there was never any action taken to address the epidemic of sexual assault and other sexual violence that involved athletes. Even when coaches approached my organization, Students Concerned About Rape Education, to address their male athletes and give presentations to them about sexual assault and rape (as I personally know happened on at least one occasion), these plans were very quickly nixed by the higher-ups at the Athletic Department.
The nature of modern college sports has made the situation involving the approach to allegations of sexual assault against athletes, and in the case of Penn State at least coaches, even worse than it was twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate. There is no doubt that Penn State from what little has been reported about this incident put the reputation of the school and the status of its football program as one of the best and cleanest programs in the country before the welfare of the young boys that were allegedly preyed on by its high profile assistant football coach.
Athletes and coaches enjoy a privileged status in college towns, one that lends itself to certain advantages especially when it comes to dealing with law enforcement. It is this culture of privilege and immunity that led to the violations of the public trust in which the administrators of Penn State engaged. This culture and the actions of the administrators could have taken this predator off the streets decades before he was ultimately arrested and could have saved the lives of countless victims on whom Sandusky forced his evil and sick perversions.
Thank God in this case there were brave prosecutors and law enforcement officers who were not swayed by the enormous pressure that they undoubtedly faced from the huge college sports machine. I have a feeling that we are not done with this scandal. I expect that we will see further resignations including the President of the university along with head coach Joe Paterno. Whether these resignations are deserved or not, I cannot see a situation in which these two and probably several other members of the Penn State community are able to hang onto their jobs.
Hopefully this criminal prosecution will have an effect nationally of tearing down this sports culture in colleges across the nation. It's good to have sports heroes, and I challenge you to find anyone who roots harder for Syracuse athletic teams than me. But along with that, we need to remember that these young men and women, and the older men and women in whose trust we place these athletes, need to be held accountable for their actions. And administrators who cover up their crimes in the name of continued prestige and money need to be held accountable to an even higher degree.
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