You’ve moved the goal post. My entire claim was that athletic programs do not financially support the overall school. As in, they don’t contribute to anything outside of the athletics program. Any profit that they generate is funneled right back into their program instead of the rest of the organization.
Now if we both agree on that, great.
Goodness gracious. Have you had a chance to look up hyponyms yet? Engineering doesn’t need to be mentioned in their mission statement, given its hyponymous meaning for education. If a grocery store has the mission statement, “We want to sell good food to people at fair prices,” apples are included in the mission statement, but that toy airplane out front for kids to ride on for a quarter a minute isn’t.
Yes: if an academic dept. facilitates child rape, you get rid of everyone involved, but you need to continue the academic program as part of your college mission. Sports aren’t the same thing.
If, however, there’s an international engineering conference where the terrible behavior occurred, I’d have no trouble with permanently eliminating the school’s participation in that conference. Which suggests a compromise: just get PSU out of NCAA, and let them continue to play football with one another to their heart’s content.
As mentioned above, the board is the same and they even admit some accountability. That said, I don’t see why this argument matters. The NCAA punishes programs all the time after the offending parties have left. Otherwise schools just clean house to avoid punishment.
Exactly. If the NCAA death penalty permanently cripples Penn State football, then that’s a very clear signal to other schools – don’t protect your athletic program by covering up child rape, or your big time sports program will be crippled in such a way so that it might never recover.
This situation is just not analogous to something that might plausibly happen in an engineering department. An engineering school is not going to be protected in this way – there isn’t a wild-eyed posse of alumni who throw money at a university like this.
And this is why my OP linked to the This American Life story about Penn State. The culture surrounding Penn State football is through-and-through disgusting, rife with petty crime underage/binge/public drunkenness, late-night disturbances of the peace, rampant vandalism and littering, public urination, and so on.
A pizza delivery guy was interviewed who said that he is routinely attacked by groups of drunken students when he is delivering on game weekends. A local resident said that she routinely has to chase kids who are peeing in her yard and then spend the next day cleaning up litter and used condoms.
When Spanier first became president of Penn State, he tried to take a firm line on underage drinking, binge drinking, and public drunkenness, and the alumni scared him so hard that he completely changed his tune. The Penn State football culture is really one of alcohol-fueled mayhem, and really doesn’t need to be protected.
Penn State is a fucking mess and the NCAA needs to shut it down.
Once again you misunderstand. Let’s take your grocery analogy. The equivalent would be if you find out your apple wholesaler is a scumbag and you decide you are not gonna sell apple anymore. Your side comes in a says, hey you need to sell apples because it’s part of your mission statement. You can’t not sell apples or else your grocery store is diminished. That’s why what you are saying is stupid and illogical. A school doesn’t need to have any individual academic subject in order to fulfill their mission and more than a grocery needs to sell apples or tofu, or anything else. Yes, they need to sell groceries, but they needn’t sell any specific item, especially if you feel you feel compelled to not sell that item based on the actions of the seller. Penn State needs to educate students, they don’t necessarily need to have engineering classes. This is a painfully simple concept you keep failing to grasp.
Plus, if you think the death penalty will act as a sufficient deterrent, you would apply it to any situation, not just sports.
No, you don’t? Do you realize how may depts. have come and gone over the years for far more innocuous reasons? Yes, a school needs to educate their students, but that doesn’t mean they are required to teach every educational subject. As such, if one dept. were to act in an egregious fashion, there is no reason not to impose as stringent sanctions as you would on sports. If anything, they should be held to a higher standard if you feel there are more integral to the stated mission.
Just for the sake of comparison, I present the 2003 Baylor U. basketball scandal. Very short version: after one player murdered another, and the head coach told his players to lie to the police so he could convince everyone the murder victim had paid his way to school by selling drugs. In fact, the coach had violated NCAA rules by paying that player’s tuition (and the tuition of another player) because the school was out of scholarships. They didn’t get the death penalty, but they were hit with severe sanctions and the coach was, for practical purposes, banned for coaching in the NCAA for 10 years. Baylor let its players transfer and many of them did.
Why do you think this would be the case? More importantly, how often do you think this scenario occurs? You seem to be arguing additional extremely punitive actions will be a deterrent to bad behavior during a black swan event when there are already extremely punitive consequences. If you cover up a child rape, you will likely go to jail, face extreme social stigma, and lose your livelihood. Do you really think adding on the consequence of the death penalty for your program really adds much? As if jail was not bad enough. All you are doing is punished innocent people, and creating more victims.
Moreover, you are assuming there were calculated, conscious, rational actions taking place during the entire time. That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. Irrational people don’t typically respond to incentives and disincentives in the same ways others do, so there is a strong likelihood this would not be a sufficient deterrent any more than the actual death penalty is.
That’s not the point. It was a hypothetical. If such a thing were to happen, would you shut the dept. down?
I don’t have to answer a hypothetical that I think is unlikely. Rules need not be theoretically applied consistently to imaginary circumstances.
This little bit bugs me. The program, in and of itself, enabled nothing. Sandusky was the molester. And then a few shitty individuals enabled him from within the program to continue his abuse because they feared bringing a bad name to said program.
Those people are jailed, dead, going to be jailed or are fired now! Why do people keep blaming the program itself? Why does the program deserve the death penalty when/if all other traces/connections to Paterno and the former regime are scrubbed from it?
A football coach and a university president covering up a child rapist is highly unlikely, yet it happened. Moreover, at a school like MIT, which I specified in initial post, the engineering dept. really is as powerful as some football programs.
Gosh, I guess now that you’re just saying my statement is stupid instead of saying I’m stupid, you’ve really graduated to civil discourse. Cookies for brickbacon!
In any case, to take your odd continuation of my analogy, of course my grocery store would be diminished by not selling apples, since selling good food is part of my mission, and apples are a hyponym of good food. Folks looking for good food are often looking for apples. In your continuation of the analogy, I’d find a new apple seller. Whereas if the toy plane outside went wonky and hurt a kid (not raped the kid, just hurtthe kid), I’d get rid of it and not worry so much about replacing it.
Uh, no. I’m aware that they don’t necessarily need to keep engineering classes. Are you clear on what “diminish” means?
Untrue. To use an example from Freakonomics, the death penalty would be an excellent deterrent for speeding in a school zone. Implement it quickly and consistently, and speeding in school zones would vanish. We decide not to do so because the downside of doing so is greater than the advantage of doing so.
Same thing applies here. The downside of eliminating football is much less than the downside of eliminating an academic department.
As an aside, I understand perfectly the argument you’re making. You seem to start from the axiomatic position that I don’t understand, and so you’re getting increasingly frustrated with me. If, instead, you consider the possibility that I understand your argument but disagree with it on principle, you might find my posts easier to grapple with.
Deterrence.
Just making my way through the thread, so apologies if this was mentioned already, but this might be the most perfect synergy of post and username that I’ve ever seen.
I honestly believe the following to be true:
If PSU had jumped on this thing in 1998, or even in 2001, there would have been negligible fallout compared to what they’re seeing now. If we would have seen Paterno give a press conference to the effect of “We have these reports about Sandusky’s activities, and he’s been banned from campus. We’re cooperating fully with CPS and the local police to find out the extent of his actions.” no one would even be considering suggesting the death penalty now.
If we had seen Curley, Schultz, or Spanier give the same speech, Paterno might have ended up under the bus and PSU’s rep would have been hurt somewhat more.
But Paterno would have been embarrassed for himself (to have not noticed sooner) and on behalf of his old friend. The administration would have been embarrassed to admit that their golden god of football was wrong about one of his senior staff members.
So to protect their egos or their buddies or both, they ended up selling the campus and the football team up the river. For no appreciable benefit to the university, just for themselves–as far as I’m aware, neither Paterno nor Spanier took a pay cut when the state endowment went south, so it’s obvious to me they care more about their own salaries than they do about the overall mission of the university.
It’s a close call.
On the one hand, I think it’s fair to say that protecting the image of the university, vis a vis what was happening in the football program, was the primary motivator for the coverup. Joe Paterno was a primary symbol of Penn State University, not just the football team. The university president was involved in their failure to do the right thing. The death penalty would send a powerful message to other institutions that the culture of impunity which seems to run rampant in American institutions won’t be tolerated when it comes to something this serious.
On the other hand the university and the primary actors have been disgraced, and the legal process is dealing with them. And in my view, the death penalty is something to be used to address an ongoing harm and put a stop to it. SMU got it because they wouldn’t stop breaking the rules, even after they had been punished once before. I don’t think it’s fair to say that Penn State’s football program is a malignant force that will continue inflicting harms if allowed to continue, whether by reason of these terrible crimes they’ve allowed to happen, or because they’re a college football program and college football programs are inherently corrupt. That ignores the interests of the multitude of stakeholders in the program whose hands are clean.
I have done no such thing. PSU Athletics pays its own way, and contributes money back to PSU (via the expedient of paying student athlete scholarships out of the athletic revenue.)
Most university athletics departments do not pay their own way, and suck money out of their institution’s general fund.
Indeed, and in the case of PSU you are wrong–the Athletic Department contributes back on the order of $10 mil a year, in the form of scholarships.
That’s a net of +$20mil better than the median bowl-caliber school’s athletic department, in terms of the effect on the university’s general fund.
I love how you accuse me of moving the goalposts, then move them yourself in the same post.
:rolleyes:
Right. Would those students be good additions to the PSU student body, absent football playing skills? If so, then sure, it sounds like they make a small contribution to campus (the school’s annual budget is 4.3 billion so it looks like 0.25% of that, roughly speaking, is from the athletic department).
If those students are not qualified entirely on their academic ability, however (which would be TOTALLY SHOCKING given PSU’s obsession with football), then it’s not really fair to talk about how the athletics department is giving anything back: if the students are only there to play ball, then giving htem a scholarship acts only to let them continue playing ball, not to further the university’s mission.
I have no idea which is the case, though.
You provoked this. Deal with it.
But there would be valid reason to stop selling a food, correct?
Why wouldn’t you just get a new toy plane? Especially if people explicitly came to your store to ride the toy plane, which in turn helped you sell food.
Yep, it this case in means weaselly cop out.
Once again, you misunderstand. The crime, covering up child rape, is obviously not equivalent to speeding, but it’s also not the variable in this hypo. The egregiousness, or nature of the infraction, is not the variable. What is variable is the punishment handed in different scenarios. Engineering and football are responsible for committing the same acts. You say one should be subject to the ultimate punishment whereas the other should not because it’s too important. It’s like saying a poor person should have penalty X for killing someone whereas a rich person get Y because they are more integral to society.
In reality, it’s not. Not at Penn state or most other major sports schools.
You respond with nonsensical drivel. I acknowledged our fundamental disagreement on the role of football. What is problematic to me is that your perspective doesn’t gibe with REALITY at Penn State. I actually agree that football is terribly overrated, and that it’s emphasized far to much at many universities. However, prescriptive evaluations should reflect the world as it is, not as I think it should be. I recognize that it’s not just a game there. People’s lives depend on it. You keep thinking because you think football is just some activity that punishing innocent people in order to theoretically offer some deterrent against a wildly improbable event, facilitated by irrational people, is worthwhile instead of what it really is, vindictive.
PSU has a good reputation within the NCAA for requiring football-playing students in particular to get actual degrees, and Paterno has been on the news more than once for cutting a kid from a game due to academic failures.
I’d have to look up statistics, but you have to remember that part of the PSU obsession with football was that Paterno gave every appearance of walking as clean a walk as he talked.
You don’t think criminal prosecution is deterrent enough?
Athletic Director Tim Curley has been indicted for perjury and will be prosecuted. Email evidence PROVES he knew more than he admitted, which means he can’t hope for a jury of dummies or Nittany Lions football fanatics.
So, if Tim Curley goes to jail, you don’t think THAT is sufficient “deterrent”?
You think other Athletic Directors at other colleges are going to say, “I don’t mind risking prison, but… the NCAA death penalty? THAT’S too scary for me!”