Joe Paterno has been fired as football coach at Penn State. It happened at about 10 pm yesterday. News reports say he was notified of his dismissal by phone. The situation evokes grief over all that has been lost, astonishment over the absurd disproportionality of it all, and of course outrage over crimes reportedly committed and condoned. Meanwhile, as you’ll see below, there are serious questions about the context in which this has all occurred.
Paterno is the winningest coach in major college football history, and had been a shining fixture at Penn State since he began there as assistant coach in 1950, six years before I was born. Angry students rioted for hours.
I can’t ignore the football side of the story, which has been so great a part of Paterno’s life. Penn State’s team is on track to win the Big Ten Leaders Division. Michigan State, my alma mater, is in good position to win the Legends Division. The thought of my school playing for the Big Ten championship against a team in such deep turmoil ought to be encouraging, from a fan’s point of view. Penn State was looking pretty tough, up until this week. But if you’re not playing against Joe Paterno, you’re not playing against Penn State. From today’s perspective, if that championship game happens, it will be the emptiest, most meaningless contest in college football history.
But that’s only a game. It doesn’t begin to touch the depth of the tragedy.
Let’s get the obvious out on the table. What Jerry Sandusky allegedly did was wrong, horrible, and incalculably harmful to many. The university’s response appears to have been criminally lacking. If reports are true, the victims were harmed in ways most of us could never grasp—especially since such a powerful institution was (again, allegedly) backing the perpetrator. From what we’ve been told, Joe Paterno seems to have done what was required of him legally, but he fell far short of doing the right thing morally.
What strikes me about this whole sad mess is its disproportionality, which is evident everywhere you look. College football is out of proportion; everyone knows that, including fans-out-of-proportion like myself. Assuming the accounts are true as alleged, Paterno’s initial action and his follow-through were disproportionately weak for such a crime. His bosses’ response to his report was nonexistent, as far as I know. Really, now, though: did Joe Paterno have a boss? When Tim Curley, Paterno’s last athletic director, was hired, did he sit Paterno down in his office and tell him, “Look, Joe, you’ve gotta understand one thing: you work for me now!”? No, Joe Paterno was (and remains) a legend. Legends don’t really have bosses. Legends are people out of proportion.
Paterno had handled his legendary status well. His reputation was beyond superb. He graduated more athletes than any other AP top 25 football coach. He gave millions of dollars away. He was known for the caring side of his character. Penn State loved him, other schools’ fans (like me) respected him mightily—and now he has taken a disproportionately tragic fall from that height.
The board’s dismissing such a man by phone seems terribly, carelessly out of proportion. Students’ rioting was horribly out of proportion.
I do not think it is out of proportion to discipline and/or prosecute those who are responsible for sex crimes.
There’s one question of proportionality I’m having trouble with, though. Penn State’s student newspaper added a sex columnist almost exactly a month before this scandal came to light. It may be the most disproportionately proportionate fact in the whole debacle. (That’s oxymoronic, I know, but maybe as you read on you’ll understand what I mean.) In her inaugural column on October 6, Kristina Helfer wrote this and more:
Often, sex is taboo. We can’t discuss what goes on behind the closed doors of the bedroom, or in my case, under a crabapple tree once.
…
At Penn State, it’s more than in the bedroom — it’s a lofted bed, a walk-in closet at a fraternity or the Nittany Lion Shrine.
…
It’s time to break society’s chains (or not), and look at sex from a different perspective. Losing control draws me toward all of this.
…
There is no better time to have a little fun and explore than in college. We have few responsibilities, and there will never be as many willing people around to experience the same things with.
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Let’s get our minds — and … [deleted] … — moving, and really delve into what’s important.
…
Kristina Helfer is a junior majoring in English and Spanish. She is The Daily Collegian’s Thursday columnist for the Collegian’s sex column….
Believe it or not, I edited out more than one especially offensive portion from that set of quotations from her column, including an unsubtle reference to sexual thoughts about “cute kids.” I could not include the last line in particular, a carelessly composed sentence (as I take it to be) whose author certainly did not intend it to be interpreted literally—though if she had, its implications could be criminal. Since I’m sure she did not mean it that way, I’m willing to regard it as merely horrendous. (The source is here. Click with caution.)
This came (I remind you) from a weekly columnist in the Penn State Daily Collegian. Hypocrisy is only considered a sin when it’s committed by conservatives.
Sexual sin is wrong. When it involves minors, it’s a crime, and it needs to be treated that way. An out-of-proportion culture struggles with knowing what to do about it, though; especially when that culture gives a platform to a woman who thinks college means “few responsibilities,” and that sex is “what’s important.”
“Losing control draws me toward all of this,” she wrote in October, oblivious to what that would soon mean to Penn State. “Breaking society’s chains” and losing control were what Sandusky did (if the crimes took place as alleged) while multiple victims never had any control to start with. Joe Paterno and his bosses took no control over the situation, we’re told. When the board finally did take control last night, students really lost control. “Losing control” drew Penn State toward all of this.
I have wept over this—without much control, I am unashamed to say.
God help Penn State. God help us all.
Also posted at First Things: Evangel
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The underlying premise of this blog post is that modern “sexual liberation”, or whatever you want to call it, has some causal connection to sexual abuse. At the very least, this is highly questionable, and if forced to bet, I think a lot of people would bet that sexual abuse is more common, not less, in cultures where sexuality is repressed, sex is not discussed frankly, and discussions, thinking, etc. about sex are treated with shame.
Shorter version: you are drastically overinterpreting not-entirely-serious statements made by an undergrad talking about the college sex scene (“losing control”, “mounting everyone”, etc.) as being about something much different (losing all moral restraints whatsoever, wanting to have sex with anyone whatsoever). It’s standard conservative evangelical free-association-of-quotes-taken-out-of-context, not any real connection.
OK, my shorter version wasn’t shorter. Apologies.
Nick, you give no reason whatsoever for anyone to think you have any idea what you’re talking about.
By the way, Nick, you won’t get very far refuting me on any “causal connection” in this post. I didn’t claim one.
You have a history here, Nick. You have a pattern. You continue to follow it. I will continue to encourage you to think more carefully; for once again, you got it utterly and completely wrong. Rather than reading what I wrote, you responded to what you expected from “conservative evangelical free-association-of-quotes-taken-out-of-context.” That’s called stereotyping, and stereotyping is the essence both of bigotry and of irrational blindness to reality.
But I don’t want that to take anything away from the main point: what’s been going on at Penn State is grievous, sad, tragic—and in at least some venues, terribly hypocritical, too.
Child sexual abuse remains one of the last remaining sins in our culture.
Unless you’ve got the connections of Roman Polanski. Then hey, it’s time to move on.
Michael Jackson himself wasn’t exactly a pariah.
And I wonder how long it will be before we starting hearing ‘Sex among children is healthy and natural, we shouldn’t stand in the way of totally understandable young urges’, then ‘actually we should encourage it, it’s psychologically more healthy if a child becomes sexually active on or even before puberty – with their peers, of course’, then ‘we all know sex among children is normal and natural – only crazy religious holdouts think otherwise – and really, so long as it’s consensual, the fact that one partner is not a child could be beneficial to the child’s growth’, then, perhaps finally, ‘actually, consent isn’t always necessary with children, sometimes what will help them most is something they reject and need more firm guidance with’.
The author nailed it. “Hypocrisy is only considered a sin when it’s committed by conservatives.”
Read the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGMS7QpM-WE) of the verdict handed down by Judge James Burge, finding Daniel Kovarbasich guilty of involuntary manslaughter of his pederast tormentor. The judge laments the fact that man-on-boy homosexual predators cannot express their feelings as the rest of society members can. OUT OF CONTROL!
Our author today nailed the hypocrisy and duplicity of Penn State in playing fast and loose with morality in the daily paper and tossing JoePa out on his butt for not stopping a man “who was simply expressing his feelings as the rest of us do.”
The common theme I see here is legacy. Joe Paterno already has a legacy. Nobody can ever take that away from him, but it has been forever tarnished by this scandal.
Kristina Helfer doesn’t yet have a legacy, she is just starting one. She sounds like the kind of girl that guys like to date but no one wants to marry. Is that what she wants? She just wrote her inaugural column. Does it broaden or narrow her future career choices? She is writing about sexual liberation, but how is making herself a sex object liberating to women?
The thing about the internet, now that her story has gone viral, this will be part of her legacy… She won’t be able to take it back. Is this what she really wants as a legacy?
Coincidently, just this week New Zealand citizen Madeleine Flannagan had to cancel a speaking engagement at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana because of a youthful indiscretion.
Her husband Matt explains:
http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/11/madeleine-grounded.html
Madeleine a committed Christian, who is married to theologian, is still being affected by a single bad choice that she made twenty years ago. I know, I can anticipate that someone is going to point out that unlike Madeleine, Kristina Helfer didn’t do anything illegal… But neither did Joe Paterno. Our moral choices do affect us, they do follow us and they do affect our legacy, forever and ever.
So then, why bring up some random undergrad’s random sex column in a student newspaper, which had nothing at all to do with sexual abuse, either this case or the issue in general?
Try re-reading the column and my blog post, Nick. Read my last comment to you, too. If you still don’t get it, I really can’t take responsibility for your inability to comprehend.
Your bias is evident, by the way, in your completely inaccurate and inappropriate use of the word “random.” You have ventured to teach what the word means; and really, in your field of study you ought to know.
Your bias is also evident in your continuing pattern of ignoring substantive and supportable criticism. See my previous comment, #4. In case it wasn’t clear enough, you have manifestly and clearly stereotyped me. Question: is there a relation (not random, but real) between stereotyping on the one hand, and (a) bigotry and (b) blindness to actual reality, on the other hand? That’s a direct question, and I expect you to answer it.
By the way, if your 11:50 am comment had actually contained some substantive criticism I would have gladly answered it. But there is a complete non sequitur from what I wrote, which you quoted there, and the response you wrote beginning with the words, “so then.” And you didn’t even try to make the case that this “random” student’s “random” column in “a” student newspaper had nothing to do with the issue in general. You asserted it, but a bare assertion like that isn’t worth responding to.
I’m still expecting a direct answer to my direct question, of course.