Institutional failure

Like most Nebraskans, I'm a fan of the Nebraska football team.  I'm not the rabid sort, but I make it a point to find a TV or a radio on fall Saturdays. I watched Saturday's game against Penn State on TV, but the best part for me was on the radio, afterwards, as I puttered around in the garage and listened to Coach Pelini in the post-game show.

It was the coach's finest moment.  He spoke bluntly, and what he lacked in polish was more than made up for in candor and emotion:

I will be honest with you. Going into the football game, I didn’t think the game should have been played, for a lot of different reasons. My job as a football coach is to educate and to prepare the kids that come into the program for the rest of their life and that’s what we are. We’re a university system. The situation that’s going on is bigger than football. 

I had the same feeling. Something seemed so wrong about this.  Wednesday's spectacle of 10,000 clueless students rioting, the veneration of the former head coach, all this just smelled rotten.  While neither the fans nor the players are responsible for this mess, the institution of The Pennsylvania State University has some soul-searching ahead.

I urge you to read the grand jury presentment.   There is an old legal saw that a decent prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.  We all should remember that Jerry Sandusky is innocent before the law.  He will have his day of judgement, and it will be from a higher authority than you or me.  Assuming his innocence of the criminal charges that have been filed, I separate this from the actions of the institution, through its leaders, who, regardless of the veracity of the charges, should have quickly and decisively acted to protect children and fulfill their legal and moral obligations.  From their own sworn testimony before the grand jury, it is clear that a cascade of Penn State University personnel failed to take steps to intervene in an apparent felony sexual assault of a child in progress and to report a suspected violent crime to the police after becoming aware of the offense.

When you read the grand jury report, you learn that a 28 year-old graduate assistant, witnessing what he believed to be the first degree sexual assault of a child in the shower room, called his father.  The head football coach apparently felt no obligation at all beyond passing the graduate assistant's report along to the athletic director, who in turn told the senior vice president.  And the president of the University, informed that a staff member had seen some sort of discomforting activity in the shower between a former coach and a child, did not ask follow-up questions, investigate any further, or heed these obvious warning signs.

Everyone understands that evil exists in the world, and that in any institution a trusted person in a position of authority can succumb to its power.  We've seen in in churches, in schools, in police stations, in the halls of Congress, and in the White House.  Normally, we can separate the bad act of a person from the insitution itself.  How do you make that distinction, though, when the chain of culpability begins with the graduate assistant, and flows through the head football coach, the athletic director, the senior vice president of business and finance, and the president himself?  The problem, in this case, is not only an individual.

I will be curious to see how the NCAA reacts to this case of institutional failure.  How does (at best) ignoring, or (at worst) covering up the signs of 13 years of child sexual assault compare to something like failing to report that some players have received free tattoos? How to you deal with this situation, when the reaction of the entire chain of command at the University, faced with these unfathomable report of the rape of a child was:

to take away the alleged perpetrator's keys to the locker room?