The Joe Paterno scandal at Pennsylvania State University wherein the beloved football coach with the most wins in NCAA history did far less than enough to address child rape committed by his defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky represents much of what is wrong with the state of college athletics and offers an opportunity to reflect on a system that has distorted our values.
Sandusky's outrageous crimes and Paterno's unethical negligence have hurt and angered many, most of all the victims and their families. Apparently, Penn State students are outraged too for all the wrong reasons. In a carnival of strange moral relativism and vigorous protestation and destruction, the students are somehow more inflamed by Paterno's firing than by the horrendous child rapes, and their possible cover ups, occurring in their community.
Many students have even gone so far as to remark to journalists and reporters that Paterno "made Penn State what it is," a sentiment that seems to be fairly widespread. If that's true, all Penn State students should be furiously filling out transfer applications as quickly as possible.
How can irrational love for a football coach muddle this kind of Manichean moral issue? There should be no outrage over Paterno's ouster. He, like others aware of the crimes, should have done more. They should have done everything within their power and then some. They didn't. And there's no excuse.
Whether Paterno himself is criminally culpable remains to be seen. But at the very least his inaction, if it does not paint him as an abusive figure himself, depicts him as aloof, generally useless and inimical to his community. Though the import of this event seems to be lost on the barbarian horde of Penn State students wreaking havoc in State College, hopefully the metaphor of young boys being violated by a representative of a system of paternalistic authority and codified contact violence will not be lost on America. Through this tragedy we have an opportunity to reassess our values and identity as a people and call for a reigning in of our out-of-control college athletics complex.
This system, rooted in the NCAA, is at many universities and in many sports a vast moneymaking scheme whose values are in direct opposition to the charge of higher education. It is a financial racket wherein students perform as prostituted gladiators in meaningless spectacles to receive their education and to generate revenue for ever-lavish, ever-useless sporting facilities and of course for the obscene paychecks of those administering the spectacle. The psychological impact of this complex, despite teaching some positive values such as self-discipline and teamwork, runs counter to the enlightenment notions from which education springs. Sports, when undertaken on such a scale for vast abstract rivalries, trifling crowns, hordes of intoxicated, paying spectators and the power of the bottom line or worse, sports in exchange for receiving an education (which is then itself interrupted and compromised by the sporting commitments) instill attitudes of subservience and authoritarianism.
Noam Chomsky said of sport's role in society: "It occupies the populations, and it keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions."
Higher education is a dominant institution itself, but it is one intended to be constantly self-questioning, not to mention tasked with scrupulous questioning of all other institutions. The response to the Penn State scandal shows that not only is this type of questioning absent in the sporting complex and its supporters, but the complex itself runs counter to the very notion of basic moral judgment. Its influence is blinding.
It is beyond tragic when a lack of even-mindedness leads many to rally behind both a man who is at best criminally aloof and a vast, crooked sporting complex that deteriorates our values as humans on a much broader scale.
