Multiplying the Penn State Victims to the 10th Power

Full disclosure: I’m Penn State blue! Originally class of ’61 but didn’t actually receive my diploma until I proudly walked across the stage 45 years later in December 2006 at the age of 67. I fell in love at Penn State (first wife) and was mentored by a wonderful professional journalist H. Eugene Goodwin (a screaming liberal who even then couldn’t figure out how I was so conservative at the age of 20). And, finally, to end this preface, I met Joe Paterno once when we shared a flight to San Francisco, had breakfast together and Sue Paterno reminded me that we were a year apart on the Penn State Daily Collegian.

Okay, now to the point of this post.

No one can have anything but abject contempt for anyone who would abuse a child–sexually, physically or psychologically. If these charge are true there is no punishment too harsh for the person who perpetrated them or who, if they had knowledge, did nothing to stop them. My very first reaction when the story broke was to say that Joe Paterno had done what was required of him legally…but certainly not morally. Later, he issued a statement admitting as much when he said that in hindsight he wished he had done more.

What is bothering me more…actually incensing me…is the reaction of people like Geraldo Rivera of the Fox News Channel and Rick Santorum, a Penn State alum, former senator from Pennsylvania and candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

Rivera’s first reaction was to declare that Penn State should not be allowed to play that weekend’s game with Nebraska. In fact, he thought the entire remainder of the season should be cancelled. Brilliant thinking! If there are eight or 15 or 30 children who were harmed by Sandusky lets magnify the effects by harming thousands of student athletes who were an average age of eight to eleven years old when these crimes purportedly occurred. Football players who have worked hard and, by Rivera’s thinking, should be punished because a coach who left his position while they were still in grade school has been charged with heinous acts and because their head coach may not have acted properly. Guilt by association is an equally heinous act.

Santorum has joined the chorus that the Penn State football team should be banned from a bowl game…if they can earn their way into one. Others are calling for the extreme sanction of banning Penn State from bowl games for an indeterminate number of years. Congratulations to the NCAA for, so far, refusing to bend to irrational calls like this. NCAA sanctions are and should be reserved for violations of NCAA regulations. Penn State has been guilty of none of these and has usually been held up as the epitome of the way college athletics should be conducted.

But, the damage Rivera and Santorum and many others are trying to do doesn’t end with the Penn State football team. As they so contemptuously point out, football generates over $40 million in profits for the athletic department and the university. What happens to that money?

Swimmers and gymnasts, wrestlers and field hockey players–male and female–get scholarships. Those sports can’t sustain themselves so football pays the bill for them. Hundreds and hundreds of bills.

It may not be the finest part of the American way but there is little doubt that a winning football team is good for a university. It keeps alumni involved in their school. It attracts money that builds laboratories and endows chairs that attract scholars. It allows non-athletes to receive scholarships so that they can escape poverty or pursue careers that might have been out of their reach otherwise. Would Penn State be a better place if Joe and Sue Paterno had not given millions of dollars to expand the library? Not likely.

Would it have been better if scholarship money had not been available to people like television producer Donald Bellisario (also ’61) who said, when he endowed a $1,000,000 scholarship in 2001, “Growing up in a hardscrabble western Pennsylvania coal mining town, I know first hand the sacrifices that are made to give a son or daughter a university education…and as a Marine veteran who returned to Penn State with two small children and little money, I remember all too well that struggle. It’s my hope that this scholarship will also ease the financial burden of other young men and women who have defended our country to attain their academic goals.” Not likely.

Rivera and Santorum and others would say to the current 45,000-plus students at Penn State, to the faculty and staff and to the more than 500,000 living alums that you too must pay the price for the failing of four or five or six people. Is that justice?

All of us in the Penn State family are extremely disgusted by the charges against Jerry Sandusky. We are saddened by the image being portrayed in the media of a great state university that cares more about football than the children allegedly abused. What Rivera and Santorum et al are doing is staining everyone associate with Penn State. Will students be tarred by this brush so that employees will no longer consider Penn State graduates the best source of new employees as a recent study showed? Will alumni turn their backs on their alma mater. I’ll bet not.

Is that Rivera’s view of justice? Is that what Santorum wants to bring to the country?

Here’s a message for these two and any other who are so easily condemning the many innocent along with the few guilty. A blue and white pox on all your houses.

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