Title: An Implication From the Penn State
Scandal that Major Media Missed
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the highest paid university president in 2011: President
Graham B Spanier. While the name might not be familiar, his institution was in
the headlines at the time: Penn State. That's right, Mr. Spanier was president
for many years of the most grotesque (known) scandal in higher education, the Sandusky Affair.
Mr. Spanier stands to face many criminal
charges for his part in ignoring the many specific complaints that Penn State
administration received over a decade regarding, well, most unpleasant behavior
going on in the showers. Thus, he was "let go" from Penn State,
receiving a golden parachute package of nearly 3 million dollars (insert
"Dr. Evil" laugh here).
He'll also get to keep his $600,000 a year
professorship in the department of human development and family studies, after
a 1 year fully paid sabbatical. For such a vast sum of money, this must be a
pretty important position. That said, I've been in institutions of higher
education for nearly 30 years now, and I've never even heard of such a position
before (much less a whole department).
It's quite possible Mr. Spanier didn't know
what was going on in the showers, so maybe he's entitled to such a huge
severance package, but there's a larger issue that nobody in the media has
managed to figure out. Allow me to connect some dots now:
One detail not fully addressed in the sordid
Sandusky affair concerns the years and years where he was allowed to engage in
his “inappropriate” behavior despite witnesses reporting it to administration
on multiple occasions: none have asked how this happened. The answer is simple:
stopping this activity is not in the administrator's job description. Administrators
have two key goals, which trump all other considerations: retention and growth.
Retention means keeping students in the system as much as possible, and a
professor having low (with administration defining “low”) retention will
generally not keep his job. As the easiest way to lose a student is to fail a
student, “Failure is not an option” has taken on new meaning in higher
education. Growth generally means growth of the student base, as more students
means a larger institution, and a larger institution means more administrative
pay; thus are standards annihilated nowadays, as standards cut into growth.
So, it was no grand conspiracy that
administrators would cover up even the most grotesque of behavior on campus.
The scandal, if revealed, could easily drive students away, reducing both
retention and growth. It was no conspiracy…administrators were merely doing
their job, nothing more.
But here’s the thing missed in this debacle:
administrators are not physically attached to a single school. There’s a bit of
a revolving door in higher education, an administrative career is marked by
going to an institution, improving retention and growth, and then being
hired/promoted to another institution. Job descriptions for open positions
almost invariably describe how candidates must have demonstrated success ,
growth and retention, in previous positions.
There’s nothing special about the
administration of Penn State any more than the administration of NYU, SLU, or
UCLA. This behavior would’ve been covered up anywhere else.
The administrators at Penn State were not
some good ol’ boys with the same last name or with 20 years of experience
working together, they’re a collection of administrators that have all moved up
through the system the same way via numerous institutions, through improving
retention and growth, sacrificing everything else about education for these
goals and these goals alone. Thus, like an ancient Greek phalanx, each
administrator knew what to do without there necessarily being any specific order
given from above: retention and growth are paramount, sodomization of
prepubescent boys in the showers on campus is nothing next to those goals.
Now we come to the seed I must plant: if a
simple random sample of administrators has so little concern for integrity and
human decency that implicitly condoning the sodomizing of children does not
cause even one administrator to resign in disgust over the course of years,
is it possible that their void of integrity fails the cause of education in
other ways?
Think about that,
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