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13 November 2011

Thoughts on Penn State, Glacier High, and athletic authoritarianism

Slightly revised on 19 November 2011. I would imagine that the trustees, faculty, and staff of School District 5, and especially the families of football players at Glacier High School, are following the football linked sex scandal at Penn State with a mixture of fascination and dread, but not that much surprise. At least I hope there’s not much surprise.

What allegedly happened at Penn State is far worse than what allegedly happened on that Glacier High bus on 12 September, and School District 5’s trustees and administrators have handled the bus incident better than their counterparts at Penn State have handled their scandal. Still, the events have something in common: the moral corruption produced by football’s authoritarian DNA.

At Penn State, no one had the courage and decency to go directly to the police (the State College, PA, police; not the campus constables); not the 28-year-old graduate assistant who allegedly witnessed Sandusky sodomizing a boy in the shower (the graduate assistant now says he did stop the assault); not head football coach Joe Paterno; not the athletic director; not anyone. They just bucked it up to the next level of authority until it reached the university’s president, who reportedly described the alleged rape as “horsing around.” What happened on the Glacier High bus also was defended as horsing around until an editorial in the Daily Interlake set matters straight:

When you allegedly have team leaders dragging teammates to the back of the bus, restraining them, punching them, threatening them and even violating them, it’s not merely hazing or bullying and it’s no longer the innocent exuberance of youth

It is, it would appear, a crime.

The Kalispell Police Department thought it was enough of a crime to warrant recommending sexual assault charges against two freshman boys.

Here in Kalispell, reported the Daily Interlake, “The incident was first reported in Tuesday’s Kalispell Police Department blotter, when the grandmother of a girl who witnessed the event reported it to both the police and the school.” If that grandmother had not blown the whistle, if going public with the story that Glacier High’s football program had been left to the coaches, the athletic director, the school’s principal, and the rest of the chain of command, we might still be unaware of what occurred.

That’s because football subordinates everything to honoring authority and protecting the program. The rights of the individual are valued less highly than the survival of the institution, no matter how rotten the institution has become. A culture of conformity becomes revered instead of feared. That’s why individuals are thrown under the bus as sacrifices to institutional survival. Many commentators have observed that the Penn State situation shares similarities with the Catholic Church’s practice of protecting priests who buggered choirboys, and they’re right.

Penn State, of course, had a problem School District 5 does not: a coach allowed to become more powerful than the university president and board of trustees. What mattered to Penn State and its football crazed alumni? Winning, and the millions of dollars generated by the football games. Ergo, their capacity for self-deception was boundless. They actually believed that Joe Paterno was a Great Man doing Great Things.

They paid him highly, and praised him mightly — but Joe Paterno was no saint. He was a megalomanic bent on coaching more wins than Amos Alonzo Stagg, another of the Great Coaches. Stagg retired at 96, so Paterno probably considered himself a relative youngster at 84. Everything Paterno did to make Penn State a great university he did because coaching football at a great university made Paterno’s football star shine more brightly than it would have at an academically disreputable cow college. Yes, he avoided recruiting violations. His program was “clean.” Venality was never his failing. Hubris was. He suffered the fate of Icarus; deserved it, too.

Cleaning up the football program at Glacier high will be easier than at Penn State. At Glacier, a fresh start requires firing all the football coaches, the athletic director, the school’s principal, and initiating more vigorous programs to root out bullying and punish bullies. At Penn State, cleanliness can come only from eliminating football and all big time athletics for at least a generation. It will take at least that long to purge the plague of Paterno worship from the university.

In the meantime, the “history proves locals cannot manage these matter themselves” foundation for the Voting Right Act suggests a remedy. Congress can help by mandating five things for all institutions that receive federal funds:

  1. No coach shall be paid more than 50 percent of what full professors in respectable disciplines — the sciences, social sciences, liberal arts, engineering, and education — are paid.
  2. No person shall coach for more than ten years at any one institution.
  3. All practices shall be open to the public.
  4. Coaches can manage substitutions, but not call plays. All plays must be called by the players, and only by the players.
  5. After the football season is over, all players, coaches, and staff must take and pass an academically rigorous course on authoritarianism and human rights, a course not taught by athletic department personnel.