A Failed Experiment (Penn State Scandal)

[n2doc]

By Michael Weinreb on July 12, 2012


Last November, as the worst month in my alma mater's history unfolded, a Penn State medical-school researcher named Craig Meyers went on the radio to detail a remarkable scientific discovery: He had discovered a potential cure for cancer. It went largely unnoticed, because Craig Meyers is a scientist and because no one associated with Penn State gave a good goddamn about science in that moment, because they were enveloped by football.

That's what we are left with now that former FBI director Louis Freeh's damning independent report on Penn State has been released: It is everything the lawyers and flacks and message-board apologists assured us it wasn't. It is a football scandal, it is a Penn State scandal, and it is a fundamental violation of the very Grand Experiment — of the balance between academics and athletics, of the notion that football can elevate a university rather than weigh it down, of the idea that men like Craig Meyers benefit from men like Joe Paterno — that the school had espoused since the 1960s. It is a betrayal of every academic advancement Penn State has made since Paterno became its head coach; it is a betrayal of all of us who came of age within Paterno's sphere of influence; and it is a betrayal, most of all, of those abused children who grew up as my neighbors, and who were ignored and then abandoned by their elders in apparent deference to the abuser himself.

Taking into account the available witness statements and evidence, the Special Investigative Counsel finds that it is more reasonable to conclude, that, in order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at the University — Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley — repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse from authorities, the University's Board of Trustees, the Penn State community, and the public at large.

It would be easy for me to say now that I saw this coming, that the mythologizing of Joe Paterno in the town where I grew up always made me a little uneasy, that I had grown increasingly skeptical of the Grand Experiment as Paterno clung to his job long after it appeared to be time for him to let go. But this is not entirely true. Because my doubt was always outweighed by the notion that the people in charge, as distasteful as their treatment of the media might be, as much as they battled against transparency and disclosure and open records, had the best interests of Penn State at heart.

This was my fundamental mistake.
more

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8160271/joe-paterno-legacy-penn-state-aftermath-freeh-report

[orpupilofnature57]

1. It's putting casuistries to work instead of

the principles of " Best Interest " .

[radicalliberal]

2. This really isn't surprising to hear.

We live in a society whose popular culture contains an anti-intellectual component, which can be traced all the way back to colonial times. Instead of being a term of respect, "nerd" is a pejorative at most of the high schools in this country; and unless they have athletic backgrounds, scientists are often dismissed as "pencil-necked geeks."