I don’t think the men in charge were thinking “Thank God we finally have an excuse to dump that Paterno guy.” I think they were concerned that keeping him would have significant negative consequences for the school. While I appreciate JP’s contribution to the growth of the school, that’s not justification to wreck what was built in order to make JP feel appreciated.
While the mistake may have been ancillary to his job, the impact on the school is very large, and the decision to fire him was based on that impact, not the exact nature of the mistake.
You on SA’s team? I honestly cannot believe you think I needed to prove “extreme sexual conduct” to prove the point of the OP, which is that Paterno morally had to report it. Paterno’s own perhaps dumbed-down version of “fondling or sexual contact” MORE THAN establishes that.
Why did I quote McQueary’s more explicit version? Well, this is where trolling comes in. We have a moron who was claiming that “fondling or sexual contact” could have been taken by Paterno, quite reasonably, to mean “non-sexual fondling.” No, I don’t know what that means to any serious adult, either. But the moron has lots of time, a huge boner for Paterno, and too much ego to be a man and admit “my hero was wrong, he clearly heard about a serious sexual assault, and morally he should have reported it to police.” He’s too small and insane a person to make that simple admission. So those of us frustrated by his lying mendacious ways are forced to quote the multiple, mutually consistent, all under oath, sources for the serious allegations that Paterno clearly heard and understood, to refute that loon’s persistent attempts to create a world in which some tiny verbal loophole in one passage of GJ allegations somehow creates a counter-factual world in which Paterno just didn’t have any way to know a sexual assault had occurred.
Paterno’s own words indict him. McQueary’s words clarify that, for those too stupid to understand that.
Like I said before - Paterno was at the heart of it a member of a university faculty. And for university faculty sexual abuse prevention is not an ancillary responsibility. It is very much a core responsibility.
I don’t know whether you needed to do it or not, but you did, and it’s clear to me what you were doing. Calling it as I see it. (Here’s a link to the original post - final two sentences.)
When I say “core responsibility” I mean the job he was hired to do. The football coach is not hired for the purpose of preventing sexual abuse. It’s an ancillary responsibility that comes with the job.
And in this case it’s even more ancillary, because Sandusky was not a PSU employee and the victim was not a PSU student. (Which is of course not to say that he has no responsibility, only that it can’t be compared to failures in his core area etc. etc.)
Paterno had control of access to the PSU facilities, where Sandusky was using such authorized access to sodomize little boys.
And, have you conveniently forgotten that Paterno was closely involved with and often served as a spokesman for Second Mile, where Sandusky was recruiting and grooming his victims? Frontmen for charities serving (exploiting) children don’t have fiduciary duties all of a sudden?
That was probably moot after he “retired,” which he already had when he raped victim no. 2 as McQueary watched and Paterno did the bare minimum. The suspicion is he was forced out because of earlier “horseplay” in the shower, though he’s earlier said (and though he’s a liar, this was borne out by Paterno’s hubristic decision to cling to the head coach position well into his dotage) he quit out of a realization that Paterno would never willingly retire.
Being a moral human being is not ancillary to being an employee of an educational institution in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Please read the Mandated Reporting Requirements ( PA Code 42.42 ).
He covered up and in doing so abrogated his legal responsibility. His choices were amoral as well as illegal.
I’m not too optimistic that this point will sink in, because you actually quoted this before responding as if you hadn’t read it. But give it a shot this time.
Morality doesn’t have a “core area” (you’re morally obligated to call the cops when you know of someone you’ve never met being attacked in the public street), but playing along, the locker room he controls and the children’s charity he lends his name to, knowing it helps Sandusky groom victims, are about as close to a core area as anything I can imagine.
You do understand (?) that overseeing the football facilities and their use is part and parcel of the “core” job of coaching, which you seem to be pretending ends when he steps off the field.
Reread the exchange, beginning with Cheesetake’s Post #1753. At best, you’re operating from a different premise and can’t relate to Cheesetake’s point.
I realize a lot of people respect Paterno, but give me a break. He’s a football coach. He doesn’t teach kids to read. He’s not going to invent the next wonder drug. He doesn’t even teach the guys to play football, for Goddess sake, he gets high level players. He also has assistant coaches and recruiters to help.
Yes, his football program helped Penn State grow. No doubt about it, he did some good things for the school and should be remembered for those things. I just don’t see how the school could possibly be expected to keep him in such a high level position now that the world knows he participated in a coverup of child sexual molestation.
A university is about more than one guy - and that guy a coach. What about the players, who are certainly wishing they had chosen a different school about now? What about the students who don’t give a rat’s ass about football, who are going to hear child molestation comments anytime they admit where they go to school?
The only way Penn State can possibly recover from this is to clear out everyone involved (IMO, that includes McCreary) and start from scratch. It’s the only way they can retain a shred of credibility as an institution of higher learning.
I don’t think I’m inclined to argue this point at this time, but I do want to clarify that there are two independent points relating to Paterno’s history and character being made.
To the extent that there is some meaningful ambiguity about Paterno’s actions and motivations, then it’s logical to use his history as a factor in judging what he likely did in this instance. This is a point being made SA and others (& FWIW, I agree with it). Others see no room for meaningful doubt as to Paterno’s actions in this matter and thus reject the point, but this is one point, such as it is.
Leaving aside what Paterno’s history tells us about this incident, and even if there is no ambiguity about this incident, and it represents a failure by Paterno etc., the question is whether he deserves to have some slack cut for him by an institution to which he gave so much. This is the point which I’ve been discussing with Cheesesteak.
Okay, but what exactly is it that you all think he did? What makes him such an exemplar of integrity?
If he “gave so much” to Penn State, he has also received quite a bit in return. I did a google search to find his salary. Wikipedia gives it as more than half a million dollars in 2007. Despite being a public university, it took a court to force the release of that figure. Wikipedia also offers the following:
Which is a paltry sum compared to other head coaches, even amongst Big Ten schools. Luke Fickel at Ohio State made $1,172,000 as an interim Head Coach.
Non-sequiturs. You can’t take a few unrelated, piddling events occurring over the course of decades and from that, conclude that Paterno was wrong to keep quiet about a little boy being ass-raped by a middle-aged man in their showers.
And what about all the people, prepubescent boys and adults alike, who weren’t ass-raped in the showers on Paterno’s watch? Why the insistence by the media, and some posters on this board, to focus solely on the negative? And frankly, even if you have a few little boys being ass-raped on one side, you still have the guy helping win a *lot *of football games on the other side. The balance still tips in his favor. We should be throwing the guy a parade, not subjecting this saint among men to a modern-day witch hunt.