By Professor Doom
I know, the Penn
State pedophilia scandal is old news…but the whole story has yet to be told, as
our court system moves slowly, sometimes even justifiably slowly. Key aspects
of the story have changed, as well, but most folks don’t know that. Everyone
heard that Penn State did receive some heavy penalties for spending many years
protecting a child molester on campus, because that molester was a coach for a
winning sportsball team.
To even call it
“molesting” is extremely generous, to judge by eyewitness testimony, testimony
that was repeatedly ignored by administrators even as they received regular
“complaints” (again, this word just doesn’t do justice to what eyewitnesses
reported) over the activities in the showers at Penn State.
Anyway, those
penalties have been removed, for the most part…most folks don’t know that,
however. Those penalties were from the NCAA only; accreditation, the
legitimizing agency that allows the school to suck up sweet student loan money,
has no penalties whatsoever for any violations, and thus assigned none.
I can’t
emphasize enough how corrupt college sportsball is, but there is a part of me
that is grateful for it. All the schools collude to make sure accreditation
doesn’t do anything about any lapses of integrity in education. This is why
it’s so very hard to see the level of academic corruption occurring on our
campuses today. On the other hand, when it comes to the competition of
sportsball, such collusion isn’t nearly so reliable. When the corruption starts
to affect the sportsball teams and favors one over the other, there’s a better
chance that the fraud will be dragged out into the open by a competitor willing
to do so to decrease the competition for whatever sportsball trophy is on the
line.
Thus it “only”
took around 20 years of complaints and suspicious activity before we finally
learned just how vile the corruption was in the Penn State sportsball program.
I promise the gentle reader that, academically, there are serious scandals
going on for much, much, longer periods of time, but there are no competitor
institutions who care to check for such things.
Part of the
reason these frauds in general go on for so long is because admin has so much
power: I’ve seen whistleblower after whistleblower try to stop frauds in higher
education…and I’ve seen whistleblower after whistleblower have his career
destroyed. Penn State is not so special
in this regard.
One of the
eyewitnesses to the abominations going on in the sportsball program was
assistant football coach Mike McQueary. A friend in the industry relayed to me that
McQueary’s complaint to Penn State
admin was he saw Sandusky “pounding” in the shower. I won’t give the exact
quote, beyond indicating that the pounding didn’t involve fists.
Naturally, admin
responded to a complaint involving a coach and a prepubescent boy in the manner I’ve seen them respond, many times
in the past:
“…the school suspended him from coaching
duties, placed him on paid
administrative leave, barred him from team facilities and then did not renew
his contract shortly after he testified at Sandusky's 2012 trial.”
--honest, there’s good
reason for people in higher ed to make their complaints anonymously.
His initial
complaint was made in 2001…imagine living 11 years in limbo like that, only to
be executed at the end. Even Vercingetorix didn’t get
such treatment. Doubtless, the university kept him around that long in the hope
of “swaying” him into not giving testimony. Once it was clear that McQueary had
at least a tiny shred of integrity (i.e., more than the entire administration
of Penn State put together) and testified, there was no need to keep him.
Not content to
simply torture his career and fire him, Penn State defamed him as well. No need
to discuss the defamation, but justice
has, at last, been served:
A jury awarded a
former Penn State assistant football coach $7.3 million in damages Thursday, finding the
university defamed him after it became public that his testimony helped
prosecutors charge Jerry Sandusky with child molestation.
Yes, over seven
million bucks, paid for by taxpayers, of course. So far, none of the
administrators who helped to cover this all up have paid any price, beyond the
Poo Bah losing his job (his golden parachute was millions of dollars, in
addition to a $600,000 a year tenured position in a field nobody’s ever heard
of).
That’s a lot of
money, but this man’s career was destroyed by Penn State, in the hopes that
such destruction would protect their sportsball program:
McQueary testified he
has not been able to find work, either in coaching or elsewhere, but Conrad
blamed that on an inadequate network of contacts and the lack of a national
reputation.
I’m happy for
him, but it just seems so…wrong that all he did was tell the truth, present his
eyewitness testimony, and must pay such a price in a system where every
institution puts in writing that it will act with integrity. It’s a shame so
many educators in higher education also have their careers destroyed simply for
acting with integrity but for now, I’ll just be happy that sometimes, some tiny
bit of justice does happen.
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