The first entry for this blog is entitled "Deliberating in a Fishbowl." I called it that even though I knew that so many people--those who have graduated and moved away, those who have national networks of colleagues, those who travel a good deal--inhabit worlds both inside and outside this fishbowl. Call us rhetorical amphibians.

 

Michael Bérubé's article, published today in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is the perfect exhibit for the challenges faced by rhetorical amphibians. Bérubé's article, which details his inevitable but painful decision to resign his endowed chair as the Paterno Family Professor of the Humanities, stands as an opportunity to once again revisit this blog's call for ethical deliberation.

 

It will be tempting for those who read the first few lines of the essay to feel they know exactly where it is going, to think that Bérubé is just one more person turning against Paterno. But it's not that at all. And for other readers, that might be disappointing.

 

So I want to focus readers' attention on just one guiding principle for deliberation: the one that stresses the importance of considering--with generosity--the position on the table. For starters, I urge you to read the whole thing. Yes, it's long. Bérubé has been relatively quiet on this topic for about a year. He has a lot to say. And his position--if I may hazard the singular here--can't be pared down to bullet points. Like most of Michael's writing, the piece rewards readers with counter-intuitive observations, with unexpected humor, with thoughtfulness. There's a reason NPR stalked him after the Freeh report was released. The essay is remarkable because of the way it engages multiple audiences: at times he seems to speak directly to State College residents and business owners; at other times the addressees are more clearly those whose wholesale condemnation of Paterno and Penn State rest on sound bites.  (Just last week Saturday Night Live, in a skit about the conversion of the Paterno biography into film, had a joke that only worked if viewers assumed Paterno himself were a sexual predator.) As a result the article may wholly please no one, but that's what makes it a perfect opportunity for ethical, thoughtful deliberation.

 

[Matthew Jordan is Associate Professor in the Department of Film-Video and Media Studies and a CDD affiliate faculty member.]

It has been said that community grows by the discovery of common meanings that we find through our ongoing conversations about who we are. This week, Malcolm Gladwell added to the ongoing conversation about what to make of the Sandusky affair.  Writing in The New Yorker, Gladwell offered an outlier perspective that has been all-too-absent amidst all the handwringing, finger-pointing and sanctimonious posturing. "When monsters roam free, we assume that people in positions of authority ought to be able to catch them if only they did their jobs. But that might be wishful thinking." Pedophiles, he argues drawing on Carla van Dam's book Identifying Child Molesters, are remarkably hard to spot. They are adept not only in grooming victims by identifying the most vulnerable children, but in charming and disarming the adults charged with their care. What Sandusky did, like all successful predators, was to place himself in a position and cultivate a respectable persona that allowed him do both. Most of this is well-worn ground; but what Gladwell reminds us all is that a successful predator is patient and deliberate, two qualities that have precisely been lacking in the frenetic period of reckoning since the mask of leadership, charity and likeable celebrity was ripped off and Sandusky-the-monster was revealed. Would that the NCAA executive committee had been more deliberate and less worried about quickly shoring up faith in their ability to govern by appearing "swift and bold," as a perspective like Gladwell's certainly would have helped.

For years, Sandusky conjured the mask of leadership by managing Penn State's much-lauded defense and the Second Mile. People who believed in these organizations added to the sheen of this public mask by projecting their own beliefs about the goodness of both onto him. Like the citizens in Hans Christian Andersen's story about the Emperor's new clothes, each time another public figure confirmed how fine it was, it became more difficult for anyone to see and articulate what was lurking underneath.  In hindsight, we would like to believe it should have been obvious because few of us want to believe that people, especially the leaders we trusted with steering the university, could have been so blind. Gladwell asks us to apply a different context and look again. Maybe our collective reaction has a lot more to do with our faith in our authority figures than we might think.

We live in a culture that, though nominally democratic, is deeply attached to the tropes of leadership. No place is the cult of leadership more potently reified than in the conversations surrounding college football.  Look at the way that games are marketed on TV: it is the coach who gets top billing, as if the qualities that he embodies can inspire young men to believe and that such faith leads to success. We heap wealth at the feet of these icons of leadership, as if to justify our overblown belief in their metonymic magic.  Yet the cult of the coach, like other cults of leadership, is deeply anti-democratic. We use words like "hard nose," "old school," "task-master" or   "disciplinarian" to describe coaches and this kind of language promotes a worldview tied to the importance of authority and obedience to it.  Linguist George Lakoff calls this the `strict father model.'  For years, sports journalists framed Paterno as an exemplar of this model, dressing him up in strict father coaching clichés recycled from the era of Knute Rockne and John Heisman.  It seemed like the older he got, the more people who shared this worldview wanted him to be a symbol of everything that they saw lacking in a soft society. As such, his desire for control of all aspects of his program, and his persnickety persona with the press, were passed off as endearing eccentricities. Indeed, the College of Communication offered a course, "Joe Paterno, Communications and The Media," that was a training ground for young journalists in how to deal with leaders at press conferences who wouldn't reveal anything they didn't want you to know.  If he was, as many players have testified during his life and after, teaching young men how to be players, leaders and fathers, he modeled the tough-love version of all three. Gladwell, too, characterizes Paterno as a "strict and uncompromising coach," yet wants us to think about what peripheral details might have been neglected due to his singular focus on football. Drawing from Joe Posnanski's biography, he argues that Paterno chose to live a sheltered life so as to tune out things that distracted him from the game he loved. Jerry Sandusky was one of those distractions, yet Paterno kept him around because he provided the good-cop affability that Paterno lacked in his role as the strict father.

We have all seen the "In Joe We Trust" t-shirts that were, and still are, sartorial statements of faith. They speak volumes about how much the community wanted to believe in Paterno's infallible leadership in all things because of his success on the football field. Yet investing ourselves in leaders is not always a bad thing in a democratic society. It is helpful when leaders inspire people to get involved in their own self-governance; it becomes harmful when our leaders implicitly or explicitly instruct us not to worry about participation in the process and relegate us to the sidelines of our communities as spectators.

It is worth speculating as to why the backlash against Paterno was so strong when people learned that he was blind to a monster whose office was right down the hall. I think it has something to do with the amount that people wanted to see him as an omnipotent great man figure. Tocqueville once argued that the more helpless and impotent we feel in modern America, the more we are apt to invest ourselves in things and people that seem bigger than we are. In the wake of the Sandusky affair, it was as if people transferred their own anxiety about their own inability to spot a sociopathic predator or charming monster onto a leader who we had willed ourselves to believe was a pitch-perfect judge of character. We blamed him for not living up to our idealization.

Gladwell spends little time playing the blame game. He seems to argue that we need to acknowledge that none of us are without blind spots, and that the more people look out for one another, the more we tend to see. You cannot, as Abraham Lincoln argued, fool all the people all the time, and Gladwell gives us the example of Alycia Chambers, an outlier who saw what others missed. If there is a take-away lesson from this tragic affair, it is that including more voices and more perspectives in our processes of self-governance - let's call it democratic pluralism - is a better way to identify the things that threaten the well-being of our community than doubling-down on our faith in our authority figures. Alas, this is a very different message than the one being promoted by critics of the Board of Trustees who argue that what we need most is a smaller and more efficient board populated by stronger leaders-in-whom-we-trust. This seems like more wishful thinking misguided by an authoritarian worldview. For the more we allow ourselves to believe that the well-being of the university is best placed in the hands of a few strong men instead of committing ourselves to deliberate democratic pluralism and self-governance, the more likely we are to miss threats that are hiding in plain sight. Keep that in mind before you purchase one of the new "Billieve" t-shirts.

This summer, after the Freeh report was released and just after the NCAA leveled its sanctions, I remember seeing a small story in the local news about how local business leaders were going to meet to strategize about what the recent events might mean for their futures. Soon thereafter, storefronts around town sprouted signs asserting that they were


But then not long after the fall semester began, and not long after the University's President hosted the school's first academic convocation for first-year students, a similar sign started showing up around campus, on Facebook, and even in some of the same store windows. It has the same design (same color scheme and similar font) but an altogether different object of support. It says


If you walk around downtown, you'll notice that some storefronts now display the two signs side by side, or one above the other. A small handful of businesses (I counted two) have posted the academics sign without the football sign. Many more only post the football one.

Does the arrangement of these signs, or the choice of one or the other, make a difference? Certainly the different configurations--football and academics; academics and not football; football only--seem to offer a menu of possible responses. And nowhere does it say that you can't support both. The signs are no doubt in conversation with each other, and it's an interesting conversation, one that might reward further reflection.

The new advertisement Penn State broadcast during its televised football games emphasizes academics first thing. This week, Penn State students, faculty, and staff will hold a Marathon Reading of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 on the quad. Next year, entering students will be asked to read a common book over the summer before coming to campus. This is all part of a deliberate effort to emphasize and nurture strengths that Penn State has long had.  It is not antithetical to sports or sports culture (a look at the list of coaches who will appear at the Marathon Reading can tell you that), but it is a coordinated effort nonetheless.

Some might even call it a movement.

[Eric Silver is Professor of Sociology and Crime, Law, and Justice at Penn State.]

In Our Rush to Get the Outcome Right, Did We Get the Process Wrong?

In the final scene of the movie Jaws, the great white shark is attacking the boat. Its head is on deck, and the boat is rapidly taking on water. All looks lost until someone throws an oxygen tank into the shark's mouth. In the next scene the oxygen tank explodes and the shark is defeated.

 In the media shark feed that followed the issuing of the grand jury report describing Jerry Sandusky's crimes, were Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier the oxygen tank?

 Just after the grand jury report was released, it was announced that two Penn State administrators, Gary Schultz and Tim Curley, were accused of perjury during their Grand Jury hearings.

 Graham Spanier's reaction to these accusations was to announce that the University would hire counsel for these administrators. His specific statements was this:

 "The allegations about a former coach are troubling, and it is appropriate that they be investigated thoroughly. Protecting children requires the utmost vigilance. With regard to the other presentments, I wish to say that Tim Curley and Gary Schultz have my unconditional support. I have known and worked daily with Tim and Gary for more than 16 years. I have complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations about a former University employee. Tim Curley and Gary Schultz operate at the highest levels of honesty, integrity and compassion. I am confident the record will show that these charges are groundless and that they conducted themselves professionally and appropriately."

 It was a moment for leadership, and Dr. Spanier was going to lead by standing by his people and allowing the justice process to unfold.

 The media's (and therefore, the public's) reaction to Spanier's statement was to vilify him as a secretive leader hell bent on a cover up. "How could he even think of hiring counsel to defend his employees when victims had been abused?"
 
The same man who only days before would have been ranked by many as among the most talented University Presidents of his era -suddenly was being depicted as at best incompetent and at worse immoral.
 
Such turn-on-a-dime shifts in our impressions ought to give us pause. But when the shark is on the boat, who has time for such subtleties?
 
Now that the shark has been fed and it seems more or less clear that the boat will not be capsized, I'd like to do something unpopular. I'd like to think out loud about Graham Spanier's road not taken.
 
I am a professor of Sociology and Crime, Law, and Justice, and I teach a class on the Sociology of Deviance. So I spend a lot of time thinking about deviance, morality, and justice.
 
And I must admit that when I first heard Dr. Spanier announce that he was hiring counsel to defend his accused employees, Schultz and Curley, I thought to myself, "good, let's let the justice process play out here and see what went wrong and who is responsible."
 
Maybe I've spent too many years in the Ivory Tower, but I believe in due process, and I felt thankful that we had a justice system in place to turn to in this high-stakes and emotionally charged circumstance - and a leader willing to make use of it.
 
A day or so after Spanier's announcement, after it became clear to Spanier that the Board of Trustees had a more conciliatory leadership plan in mind, one that was NOT based on due process, Spanier resigned. And on that same day the Board of Trustees fired Joe Paterno (without benefit of due process).
 
It is easy to understand why the Board did what it did. The great white was champing at the boat and the Board needed something with a lot of TNT to throw in its mouth.
 
As we all know, the Board's TNT didn't succeed in stopping the media feeding frenzy. Though maybe it did keep the boat from capsizing.
 
Either way I can't help but wonder: What happened to due process? And without it, what message did the Board's actions send? Did the public interpret the firing of Joe Paterno and the resignation of Graham Spanier as admissions of guilt by the University?
 
Due process is the fundamental moral principle that underlies our justice system. It's based on the notion that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. Due process exists to make sure that the accused gets a fair trial and that punishments are not meted out based on public opinion, hearsay, or mass hysteria.
 
And here's the tricky part: Because it protects people from false accusation, due process must always risk being insensitive to victims. It asks victims to be patient while all the facts are aired, and their accusations along with the accused's responses are considered from all angles, so that the most just outcome can be achieved. It asks the public to withhold judgment until all the facts are known.
 
And yet, when Graham Spanier decided to hire counsel for his employees - a due process move - and when Joe Paterno announced that he would finish out his last season before retiring - each believing that they had done nothing criminal and that the justice process would bear that out - both were vilified by the media and lynched by the public.
 
Sandusky's crimes had touched a chord so disturbing that our collective ability to think clearly about the nature of justice was obliterated.
 
So much for due process.
 
In the end - when the justice process surrounding the Penn State scandal finally plays out - with the cases of Schultz and Curley - we may decide that the Board got the outcome right and that the careers and legacies of Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier deserved to be destroyed.
 
But what if Schultz and Curley are found innocent of perjury and cover-up? What then? What will we make of the Freeh Report and NCAA sanctions? And what about the firing of Joe Paterno and the loss of Graham Spanier?
 
Unfortunately, up until now, the only two entities out there who have been willing to critique the process by which the scandal was handled are the Paterno family and Graham Spanier. And because they both have something to gain by influencing how people see things, their arguments are easy to dismiss. And because I'm a Penn State employee, maybe mine are too.
 
It seems to me that Spanier and Paterno were tried and convicted in the media (including the Freeh Report) for allegedly covering up Sandusky's crimes in order to avoid bad press for the University. But isn't it also true that these two individuals were dumped by the University's Board of Trustees--without benefit of due process--in order to avoid bad press for the University? How can one seem so wrong and the other so right?
 
My point is not that we ought to remain indifferent to child sexual abuse or any crimes for that matter. My point is that before we mete out punishment on the basis of accusations, and regardless of how serious those accusations are, we need to have due process. Without it we live in a frightening world where people are guilty until proven innocent.
 
This is especially worrisome as we begin shoring up our reporting procedures in order to make sure that something like this never happens again.
 
Whether or not we got the outcome right, one thing seems crystal clear to me: we got the process wrong. We are all against child sexual abuse and we are all against engaging in cover-ups. But in our rush be against these things did it make sense to cut short the justice process?
 

And so I'm left wondering, what exactly is the lesson here? If we want people to do the right thing for the right reasons without fear of negative publicity; if we want to believe people are innocent until proven guilty; then were Paterno and Spanier treated in ways that will encourage or discourage people from doing the right thing for the right reasons in the future?
 
In a just society the surest way to get the outcome right is to get the process right. It's not a guarantee but it's the best way we know. And in this case I can't help but ask: In our rush to get the outcome right, did we get the process wrong?
 

[John Christman is Professor of Philosophy, Political Science, and Women Studies and Co-Director of the Social Thought Program.]

Discussions of the recent events at Penn State have understandably focused on issues like the NCAA sanctions, the Freeh report, the nature of Penn State governance and so on.  In addition to these topics, I would also hope further reflection would take place about deep and complex issues of ethical obligation that affect us all, as a community, and not just the individuals who were directly involved in the actions or cover-up of the actions of Jerry Sandusky.  There is a tendency to think that these actions were isolated and that the kinds of horrific ethical lapses they involve are rare, especially as they concern sexualized assaults on children and the conspiracy of silence that appeared to surround those crimes.

But if we consider this to be a token of a different type, as an act of sexualized violence with bystanders and enablers in tow, then this is hardly rare, and the Penn State community should take this opportunity to consider much more seriously the implications of the culture we have helped to create and tolerate.

For Sandusky's acts involved sexualized assault on victims that were not in a position to meaningfully consent to such actions.  Sadly, unwanted sexual assault is a horribly common occurrence in State College.  And bystanders, witnesses, friends and others in a position to respond and report such incidents are all too numerous.  I refer of course to all manner of rape and sexual violence against women that are part of the accepted party culture that has grown up on and near our campus.  The idolization of athletics and the entertainment industry that this supports is surely a major contributor to this culture, as is alcohol abuse, lax sanctions for infractions, and mis-placed tolerance of bad behavior by faculty and administrators.

But also relevant to this pattern is the patriarchal structure of the social institutions of the student and alumni communities.  Fraternities and sororities can, of course, support socially valuable activities, and many of the social connectedness and community building they facilitate provide great benefits for their members.  But the specter of huge male-only fraternity mansions whose entire purpose is to host parties for students (and other young residents, whether of drinking age or not), structure the social landscape here in ways that reflect an archaic sex-segregated and male dominated social scene.  Women enter these citadels as visitors, not as residents or participants.  The atmosphere of aggression and unbridled masculine energy is impossible to ignore on any typical weekend (and many a weekday) night.

According to the State College Police Dept. there have been between 5 and 9 "forcible" sexual assaults on campus and between 1 and 5 off campus each year from 2008-2010 (http://www.police.psu.edu/cleryact/documents/116593_PolicySafety_UP.pdf).  These, of course, do not include unreported incidents or cases where police were not involved.  And according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, only about 54% of such crimes get reported.

For a community of our size, this is an unacceptable phenomenon.  It is tolerated as part of the college culture and a large institution of this sort.  But such toleration raises issues of complicity, cover-up, and insensitivity to victims every bit as serious as those involving university administrators in the recent scandal.  Efforts and programs already in place to respond to these crimes and to aid victims are invaluable and must be supported.  But the culture I describe has not altered much in the 14 years since I moved to this area and shows no sign of abating any time soon (though a losing football team, like a rainy Saturday, has an amazing capacity to water down this kind of atmosphere). 

Therefore, I hope the conversation about ethical issues emanating from these events broadens to include the wider phenomenon of sexual violence and aggression in our community and the "culture" that tolerates it.  

[Jack Selzer is Barry Director of the Paterno Fellows Program, faculty member in the English Department, and CDD Board Member ]

Last week I was doing research in the New York Public Library on one of my intellectual heroes, Kenneth Burke.  Among his papers, I ran across a story that he was planning to tell in one of his books or articles, but I don't think it ever appeared.  (Fellow Burkophiles will recognize the tale as typical of Burke's views on perception and perspective.)  Here's how it went:

Once upon a time a man was on trial for arson.  The prosecution called as a witness another person who claimed to see the defendant leaving the building just before the fire broke out--he (the man now on trial) was smelling of gasoline.
 
The defense lawyer, in an effort to undermine the testimony, then produced ten identical vials containing equal amounts of clear liquid.  He asked the witness to sniff each vial and report which ones smelled like gasoline.  The witness sniffed each one and then said that each one smelled like gasoline--whereupon the defense attorney produced an affidavit to the effect that an expert had established that only one vial contained gasoline. Voila!

But on cross-examination, the prosecutor established that the FIRST vial was the one that had contained gasoline.  Smelling the first one, it seems, contaminated the witness's senses and judgment enough that the witness concluded that gasoline was in every vial.

I guess the moral of the story is pretty elementary:  Once you start smelling gasoline, you start smelling it everywhere.
 

The U-Hauls are back, which means that the SUVs and mini-vans that signal move-in day aren't too far behind. Penn State's welcome-week slogan this year, as shown at right, is "Moving In, Moving On." Something tells me this slogan is a recent decision, one that refers directly to the Freeh report. If not, then it seems like a lucky coincidence. At the very least it sends a message that this campus is ready to move on from the Sandusky scandal.

Talk of moving on is understandable, but it also worries me. Is there such a thing as moving on too quickly? Sure, things will change--like many of you, I received notice that I am to undergo mandatory training for the Clery Act--but will new layers of bureaucracy and mandatory training modules translate into the kind of change that needs to happen? 

There is an important difference between moving on too quickly and looking ahead, or figuring out where to go from here. In that spirit, I want to ask how people are planning to approach the coming semester. Will the Sandusky verdict and the Freeh report affect our classrooms? It seems inevitable that they will in many cases, but how, exactly? How--that is, with what message(s)--ought we welcome the Class of 2016?  What about returning students? Should everybody move on? And what might moving on mean?

[Sanford G. Thatcher is Director Emertus of Penn State University Press; below is a letter to the NCAA president sent just after the sanctions were announced.]


Dear Mr. Emmert,

Please do me the favor of reading my comment to this Chronicle story
and also sharing it with Ed Ray (whose e-mail address--unlike Graham
Spanier's when he was PSU president, I might add--is not publicly
available).

I was expecting the sanctions to be harsh, and I do not feel they
are unjustified. I have not been among those who deified Joe Paterno
and felt the football program was the best thing Penn State had to
offer. I was as appalled as anyone by the actions of top
administrators at Penn State with whom I had worked for many years
and regarded as friends, and I cannot defend what they did--if the
allegations in the Freeh Report all do turn out to be true in the
end (and this process is far from over).  As director of Penn State
Press, I also championed the publication of a couple of books that
are sharply critical of the way big-time collegiate football
programs are run:
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03293-1.html
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03368-6.html
And I served, and continue to serve from a distance, with a group of
Penn State faculty from all areas of the university's curriculum
(business, law, journalism, liberal arts, medicine, etc.) who have
been assiduously working to make PSU a leader in research and
teaching on intercollegiate athletics and its reform.

I was very disappointed, however, in the way you presented the
grounds for the unprecedented NCAA sanctions in this morning's news
conference, justifying them as reflecting the priorities of the NCAA
in aiming for the right balance between athletics and academics.
First of all, this was NEVER the problem at PSU, as you well know:
the Grand Experiment was the shining example of how that balance
could best be struck, and it was what Paterno worked for all his
life. Second, in imposing the sanctions, the NCAA has contradicted
itself by requiring PSU to prioritize athletics over academics by
protecting  any other athletic teams from absorbing any of the $60
million in penalties. Surely, you must realize that the consequence
of this restriction is precisely to force PSU to take the money out
of the academic side in one way or another, as I note in my comment.
How, exactly, is that helping Penn State to move toward a future
where the balance is struck in the right manner?  This contradiction
was so immediately apparent to me that I am surprised that none of
the reporters bothered to raise a question about it. But I hardly
think I am the only one who will see irony in the framing of the
sanctions in this manner.

Moving forward, you said that you expect and hope that this
situation was so unique that the NCAA will never have to take such
unprecedented action again. But, as two journalists here in Dallas
pointed out last week, cases of child abuse are all pervasive in our
society--in the church, in organizations like the Boy Scouts, in
K-12 schools, in private homes--and given that stark reality, it
seems quite unrealistic to expect no reoccurrence of the
Sandusky-type affair, which presumably will oblige the NCAA to get
involved again and again--unless it wishes, well, to turn a blind
eye to the reoccurrence because it just can't deal with the reality.
Gary Schultz wondered about a Pandora's box at Penn State. I think
you need to be concerned about a Pandora's box at the NCAA also.

Sincerely,
Sandy Thatcher
Director Emeritus
Penn State University Press

[Jack Selzer is Barry Director of the Paterno Fellows Program, faculty member in the English Department, and CDD Board Member ]

Leaving aside the issue of whether our local culture is Uniquely and Extraordinarily Corrupt (you can probably tell what I think about that hypothesis), I am not especially disturbed about the fine the university must pay or the penalties to our football program in terms of scholarship limitations and bowl exclusions.  Terrible crimes to children occurred on our campus and we must do what we can to rectify the damage and ensure that something like it cannot recur here. But I also appreciate that the NCAA sanctions give us an opportunity to reflect on what needs to be changed in terms of the way athletics is conducted here (and elsewhere), and I would like to begin a conversation about that--one that reflects thoughts that I have held for some time, since I'm very interested in sports.

One of our institutional challenges is to commit ourselves to a sports program that aspires to the highest ethical standards.  These would be standards that would go beyond the conventions laid out by the NCAA; indeed, if we do things right, we could inspire others to make analogous changes.  I would like to see us commit ourselves to an athletic program that puts Student Welfare / Student Development first (as a guiding principle), including  improvements in eligibility guidelines and in player safety.

By eligibility guidelines, I propose the following:

1.  All athletic scholarships would be awarded on the basis of financial need.  Note that I'm not proposing an end to athletic scholarships but the awarding of scholarships in a way that is similar to the Ivy League schools:  strictly speaking, the Ivys claim to offer zero athletic scholarships, but everyone knows that they give athletes special admission consideration (fine by me) and that they give 100% of their students need-based scholarship support.  To encourage best practices, I might suggest that we NOT give players additional financial stipends but instead commit ourselves to need-based support (up to, say, $3000) for study abroad, internships, and self-sponsored undergraduate research for those who wish to pursue those activities

2.  All athletic scholarships would be guaranteed for four or five years, assuming the student-athlete participates in the sport and maintains satisfactory academic performance.  Penn State already adheres to this principle because all Big Ten schools do so, but the Big Ten is unique among BCS conference schools in his regard.  (It's one big reason the SEC is so powerful in football:  because they offer only one-year guarantees, they can recruit 25 players per year and still stay under the scholarship limit because they cut the bottom-caliber players, even if they have 4.0 GPAs.)

3.  We would commit ourselves to the principle that no PSU teams in any sport would go to post-season play (bowls or NCAA playoffs) unless the team has a 75% graduation rate or better.  This is 10% less than the rate of our general University Park student body.

4.  Coaches would be evaluated (i.e., retained / rewarded or not) according to criteria having to do with the performance of their players both on the field and off the field; players would be surveyed in a way analogous to faculty SRTEs (only better).  We might look into the appropriateness of giving coaches tenure after a suitable probationary period, and we would expect our coaches to have advanced degrees (at least masters).

5.  Except in unusual cases, we would try to schedule non-conference games only with teams operating under similar principles.  Within the conference, we would advocate for other Big Ten schools to adopt these same measures. (I'm willing to accept looser graduation rates at other schools if the graduation rate for all students at that school is lower than ours.)  There are enough teams in the Big Ten now that teams could play a full schedule only by playing other Big Ten teams, if it comes to that.  And the Big Ten Network means that our sports revenues would be healthy enough to fund our scholarship commitments and coaches' salaries. The Ivys essentially play within themselves, so why not the Big Ten?

6.  Athletic schedules would be constructed so that students' academic progress is not undermined.  

7.  We reaffirm and monitor our commitment to non-discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation and agree to abide by Title 9.

(Other possible ideas:  Encourage other PSU campuses to offer as many sports opportunities as possible, including football:  emphasize participation rates.  Encourage further expansion of intercollegiate club sports at University Park so that ultimately our campus is noted for participation opportunities.  Commit ourselves to never opposing an athlete's desire to transfer.)

By safety guidelines, I mean that we would commit ourselves to putting player safety above everything.  For example:

--We would have a zero tolerance for the use of performance-enhancing drugs.  To enforce the policy, we would look into the appropriateness of mandatory unannounced testing of varsity and club athletes.   (No, right now there is no such a policy.  Players are given several second chances according to NCAA rules; when was the last time you heard of a player being set down for taking PEDs?  And if you asked me what percentage of Olympic track and field athletes have ever used PEDS, I would guess the answer would be close to 100%.)

--We would have players regularly checked by physicians of their own choosing to ensure safe diagnoses and safe conditions.  This would hopefully eliminate dangerous practices such as cutting weight to dangerous levels (e.g., gymnasts, wrestlers:  recall the UMichigan wrestler who died from excessive weight loss), eating disorders, and excessive weight gain (e.g., football:  recall the Northwestern player who I believe died after being encouraged toward excessive weight gain).

--We would not take part in sports that seem to require irremediable injury as a natural corollary to the rules.  In particular, I am concerned about concussions in football, field hockey, hockey, lacrosse, and perhaps etc.  If we truly care about children, we should be concerned about concussions in primary and secondary school sports and refuse to be party to dangerous practices:  if a sport is dangerous in terms of irremediable injuries, we should not take part.  

Are there other items that others would add to this list (or subtract from it) so that we can offer an athletic program that adheres to the highest ethical standards?  Again, the principle would be a commitment to athletics as a means of student development.

[Christopher Reed is a faculty member in the Department of English.]

Debbie Hawhee's thoughtful post about the Penn State Way made me think about the much-loved chant, which is still going on this week... with increasingly desperate fervor.
On days when lots of prospective students and other visitors come to campus, the chant goes on all day long outside my office, lead by official PSU tour guides. "We are!" they bark, "Penn State!" Comes back the response.

What does this chant say? First and foremost, that the fundamental value of this institution is conformity to the group. You arrive as a visitor. You get out of your car, you join a tour, and suddenly you're expected to affirm the same creed as the stranger standing next to you. Before the meaning of the words comes this imperative to all speak the same way at the same time, to make it loud, to be seen to be conforming to the group.

This ethos of conformity plays out in many other Penn State rituals: the pride people take in how many of us wore the same color t-shirts on the same day, the way the crowds at the games all wave the same way at the same time. Or consider the dress of Penn State students: everywhere else in the world you wear a t-shirt (or sweatpants, or cap, or heaven knows what else with a logo) when you are somewhere else, as a mark of something distinctive about you. "Hey, you're from Wisconsin - I just went there on vacation" or "Wow, you like chess -- me too." Here the student body presents itself to itself in the garb of conformity. "I'm from here." "I am here."

That's the problem with the Penn State Way - it's not "Ways" -- there is only one. To belong you have to conform. Conforming is belonging - that's what those words - "We are Penn State" -- uttered that way mean.

We justify that imperative with happy words about community and good feelings about being part of a group. But we don't acknowledge that the price of all that conformity is the squelching of difference, of dissent - and of the kind of individual moral compass that would have led anyone involved in this whole sorry Sandusky story to stand up and do the right thing.

This is a bigger problem than just Penn State's. We represent a particularly acute case of a dynamic that affects much American discourse, in which dissent is seen as unpatriotic, and identification with teams following the directives of coaches is an unquestioned ideal. This is at the core of the "culture of reverence for football" that the Freeh report identifies as a root cause of the current crisis.

Unsurprisingly the NCAA punishment does nothing to alter this culture. In fact, as Sophia McClennan's post points out, it perpetuates the problem both by trading in its status as an apparently unquestionable authority and by hyping the status of football bowl games. As Kurt Davidson points out, the NCAA censures "Penn State" for the failures of its leaders, but then they send us all of us an enormous bill that, contrary to reports, will not be paid out of the athletic budgets alone. "Penn State Spokesman David La Torre wrote in an email that the university will use the 'athletics reserve fund, capital maintenance budget and, if necessary, an internal bond issue, to address the fine.' Go here for a link to that report.

And our current leaders, instead of protecting the academic mission of the university, accept this as a reprieve from simply closing down the football team for a few years, as if the rest of us couldn't live without it. As if we don't have other sports and other activities that have withered in the shade of "football weekends" when nothing else can be scheduled. As if we can't attract students who would prefer to be at a school where football weekends - and the drinking that goes with that term -  are not the unquestioned norm. Apparently what "we are" is the football team, like it or not.

And then there is the "vacating" of victories to make sure that Joe Paterno is not honored as the "winningest" coach. The logic here seems to be that football winners are heroes, heroes are flawless, therefore a flawed person can't be winner. Isn't this the logic that allowed Sandusky to get away with his crimes - he is a football hero, therefore flawless, therefore can't possibly be guilty of what we have seen or heard about? Yet like some totalitarian government rewriting history to justify itself, these wins are simply going to be erased, so that once the NCAA records have been scrubbed clean of these flawed heroes, we can all go back to the kind of sports-hero worship the president of the NCAA says he's against. Apparently it's too complex a thought for the NCAA to sustain that the same values that lead teams to unprecedented victories also lead people to sacrifice those who threaten the integrity of the team - even when they are needy little boys. That kind of complex, critical thinking might lead away from group-think and toward individual assessments of particular acts by coaches and other leaders. And the NCAA apparently can't have that.

So what can we do in the face of the hypocritical NCAA penalties  (who are they to complain that Penn State let "athletics" overwhelm our "core values" when they have done so much to promote athletics as hero-worshipping group-think?)? Well, one thing we can not do is rally 'round the hobbled football team as if we can just pretend nothing happened. We need to come up with other ways to manifest our identities - in the plural -- as part of Penn State. We need to value to diversity, difference, and dissent. This will be a huge change for an institution that has lodged its identity so completely onto one thing, and, more fundamentally, onto the idea that its identity is singular. So for starters, we need a new chant. "We are!" and then everyone say something different.