No, it’s not. I’m sorry I didn’t catch that.
I retract the note.
You must have missed this sentence " Medical schools, housed on university campuses, are powerful and isolated fiefdoms." In other words, it was a similar situation to Penn State.And when the reporter writes,
it doesn’t look as though it was a deliberate coverup. It’s not even clear that the failure to report was a deliberate decision.
I found nothing that suggested Miramonte covered up allegations against Ricardo Guevara-only that there were allegations dating back to 1995 and he was convicted of an incident that happened in 2003. Berndt was fired within 3 months of the investigation beginning, and arrested six months later. The article doesn’t state when the school learned of the allegations against Springer, but he was arrested less than 3 years after the incident.
That’s right, they didn’t report him to the police.Don’t see where they continued their association with him after hearing of the allegations.
The things you are bringing up are certainly not similar. As wrong as Paterno , et al were for not reporting the initial allegation to the police, that is indeed something that could and does happen anywhere. Find me a single other example in the last 30 years where not only was a deliberate decision made to not report the abuse to the proper authorities , but as an ex-employee the abuser was allowed to continue his association with the (school, department,camp) which of course allowed him access to new victims and where employees reported actually seeing the abuse. Oh and the RCC doesn’t count, because that culture was much the same as the one at Penn State. Even the Boy Scouts put abusers on a list prohibiting them from being associated with the program.
I disagree. I believe anyone who was approaching the situation even halfway rationally (knowing how Penn Staters generally tend to value the culture of cleanliness that Paterno portrayed–AND presuming our timeline of the first reports reaching the university’s ears in 1998) would have evaluated “Sandusky’s been accused of child molestation. We’re cooperating fully with police and child welfare services.” as the best single thing they could have done.
You have misunderstood my argument, then, if that’s directed at me. If Penn State’s football program was a podunk Division III team, I would hold the same position. If this were Penn State’s Medieval Studies department leadership implicated in this kind of coverup, I would hold the same position.
The cover-up didn’t materially benefit the football program or the university, therefore there is absolutely no reason to punish the institutions as a whole for the actions of the corrupt leadership.
The fact that the program is of fiscal benefit to the university’s academic mission is just icing on the cake.
I think that only works if the parties responsible could, in 1998, be confident that any cover-up would eventually–as in, within their lifetime–be uncovered. I don’t think that’s a safe assumption even now, much less in 1998.
But even if it were, it still seems that they acted to cover up the crime in order to protect the football program, whether or not such an act was rational. And if they did it, other folks will be tempted to do it.
Deterrence.
I never said it was. :rolleyes:
First of all, I disagree–even if the act could have been perfectly covered up, Penn State Football under Joe Paterno’s “Great Experiment” would have (IMHO, as someone on campus as a student at the time) quite obviously benefited from the publicity of “we caught someone doing wrong; we punished him. Even one of the longest-tenured coaches in the program is not exempt from the watchful eyes of JoePa, and that’s how you know we’re the cleanest team in college football.” It would have played to the image PSU was keeping of itself to do so.
Second of all, why would such an act be considered to be “protecting the football program” when it does not benefit the football program, instead of “protecting their longtime friend and colleague’s reputation” which it very well could have succeeded at if no one had uncovered it?
I disagree with your assessment, by the way. Even in 1998, the writing was starting to be on the wall with the Catholic Church and abuse–if you abuse a kid, they WILL eventually come out of the woodwork and people WILL care–and they don’t come bigger and more secretive than Mother Church, so what chance did PSU have?
What was it then? People just forgot? Didn’t follow up? Do you honestly believe that? Prior to the Freeh report, would you have believed PSU if they attempted to use that line?
Regardless, you implied there was some magical confluence of events at Penn State that allowed this to happen in the football program, but would not in an engineering program. That is clearly not the case with a med school, so I am not sure why you think any department would be immune to such failures. Especially when the engineering dept., at one of the best engineering schools in the world, is just as powerful as many big sports programs.
You don’t look very hard then. To quote one article:
Care to clarify your statement?
Wrong again. Here is a a more detailed article.
So he confesses to the campus police in 2002, works there the next summer (presumably), and is hired as faculty member in 2007. Seems pretty similar to PSU to me.
Do you really want to hang your hat on the fact they allowed him to quit rather than reporting him, so the whole thing is not similar to Penn State? Especially since THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT PENN STATE DID TO SANDUSKY AFTER THE FIRST INCIDENT. This guy was also allowed back on campus to potentially molest more kids. Clearly, there are schools, not motivated by football or enabled by a feckless board, that cover up abuse accusations. Yes, they are not exactly the same as PSU, but they are as separate incidents are going to be.
See above. Either way, do you think the fact that they allowed him to keep coming to campus, as an ex-employee, is what got Penn State in trouble? It’s that they didn’t report a child rapist. It hardly matters that his future victims, unlike those of the other scumbags, were taken advantage of at PSU while the perpetrator was an ex-employee. Like people are saying, “you know the rape wasn’t so bad, it’s the employment status pf the rapist that bothers me.”
By not reporting and investigating accusations, you give the criminals the opportunity to acquire more victims. You act as if Penn State had just not allowed Sandusky on campus after the first incident, nobody would be mad.
No, but if everyone at PSU had said they thought another person had reported it , i would have believed it. Not excused it, but believed it, But that’s not what they said. Instead, they weren’t sure what happened, McQueary was vague about what he saw, etc. A deliberate attempt to cover it up , not misunderstanding or confusion about who was to report it.
Of course the attorney suing them alleges there was a coverup. But the KTLA news story says “The Berndt case in particular has raised questions about whether the school properly handled misconduct issues in the past. Authorities have acknowledged that a 10-year-old girl claimed Berndt tried to fondle her in 1994. **Sheriff’s detectives investigated the allegation, but the district attorney’s office rejected the case, saying there was not enough evidence to prosecute.” **Clearly that incident wasn’t covered up. Although one of the attorneys believes that the LA sheriff is not equipped to investigate such accusations
When someone other than the people sueing them says he confessed to the campus police in 2002 , like the person he confessed to (after all, if the lawyer knows there was a confession, he must also know to whom it was made) , maybe I’ll believe there was a coverup that was even worse than Penn State. What’s actually known is that the school received a report in 2007 about abuse that occurred 5 years earlier, and ReVille was gone within a few months.
No, people aren’t saying the rape wasn’t so bad. They’re saying the rape was bad enough and on top of that PSU allowed itself to be used as bait for him to get more victims. For no apparent reason other than to keep him and Paterno happy- which is where the deification of Paterno and selling out the football stadium comes in. Lots of places don’t report sexual abuse. Some may not even fire people right away. How many had high-level officials lie to a grand jury?
Wow! So if Paterno had just said, “oh I though Spanier had that covered,” you would be okay with that? This is becoming farcical. There is no chain of command here since EVERYONE HAD A DUTY TO REPORT IT TO AUTHORITIES.
You realize that basically the same thing happened initially with Sandusky right?
But there are no similarities? Either way, the coverup in both cases, was not telling the public or taking the appropriate steps to remove that person from their position.
Oh what bullshit. Do you think the attorney just made it up? Regardless, they still covered it up after firing him when they listed reason for termination as, “mutually satisfactory release”. They also did not report this to authorities, which allowed him to be hired at another school soon after. How you are insisting this is not a coverup is beyond me. Even under the BEST circumstances, the only difference between this and PSU is the Citadel didn’t allow him back after they “fired” him. Which, of course, is of small consequence in the grand scheme of things since the location of his victimization is fairly inconsequential.
I disagree. People are saying they covered up rape. The allowing him back on campus is just fuel to the fire. Either way, there is still a fire. Furthermore, they likely didn’t cover up to “keep Paterno happy”, they did it because they were trying to cover their asses in a plausible way. If Sandusky just disappears, people ask questions. People actually did have questions around the time he quit since it seemed fairly abrupt. If he just dropped off the PS campus, it would have aroused suspicion considering they would have to tell several people that Sandusky was not welcome in order to keep him off campus. Either way, this is just speculation on both our parts that not really consequential to the debate which is whether an influential football program is a necessary condition for a coverup of this magnitude. It’s not.
How many high-level officials are called to testify to a grand jury? The only reason we know what we do about the PSU scandal is because PSU is so visible, and because people care about their football team. There is no way this gets the press and attention it does if it happens at, say, The Citadel. It’s only because Paterno is a household name that we know most of this stuff. If anything, PS is under more scrutiny than they otherwise would be.
Either way, that is not the point. You said:
Which is completely false. Similar things happen all the time as evidence by 3 cases I found in recent history. There are tons more that happened before the Clery Act, hence the need for it. That’s on top of the potential cases we likely don’t know about. There was nothing unique about PSU football that allowed this to occur.
Again, I understand your logic… but my questioin is, WHICH guilty parties would be punished if the Penn State football program were shut down for, say, two years?
Paterno? He’s dead. How would shutting down football punish him?
Sandusky? He’s going to prison forever. What does he care if the football program is shut down?
The athletic director and his boss are under indictment, and SHOULD go to jail. They no longer have their jobs. How is shutting down football punishing THEM?
Spanier is no longer President of Penn State- I hope and expect he’ll also be indicted and prosecuted.
Get the idea? NONE of the guilty parties are sitting comfortably in their lavish offices, sipping champagen and laughing with impunity at their accusers. They ARE getting what’s coming to them.
The guilty parties are no longer the NCAA’s concern. There’s NOTHING the NCAA can do to the guilty parties. Only the criminal justice system can punish them, and they’re going to do just that.
I’m fine with the concept that, when the guilty are justly punished, sometimes the innocent must suffer. But in this case, the guilty wouldn’t be hurt at all by ending the football program!
Giving Penn State the death penalty would accomplish absolutely nothing EXCEPT to make some angry people feel as if SOMETHING was being done.
If you’re saying that Penn State shouldn’t be punished more severely than Baylor because someone died at Baylor and nobody died at Penn State, I understand your point but I don’t agree. Nobody died at SMU and they did get the death penalty. Someone died at Baylor and they didn’t get that penalty. So the fact that nobody died at Penn State doesn’t matter. Baylor was not held responsible for the murder of the player and Penn State isn’t going to be punished for the actions of their former coach. The punishments are over the coverups and rule breaking by the staff. The difference to me is that the problem at Baylor didn’t go above the basketball coach and his staff. At Penn State, it involved the football coach, athletic director (who was Paterno’s guy anyway) and the president and VP of the school.
I really think you’re being far too sanguine about this, and in particular letting your knowledge of how things played out in our timeline influence your sense of how things would have been viewed without that knowledge. If Sandusky had been fired in 1998 the primary reaction would have been OMG CHILD RAPIST AT PSU FOR DECADES; the “St. Joe will fire even his best friend” part would be pretty well drowned out. Maybe it would have been the takeaway years down the road (if nothing further embarassing had come out about Sandusky’s activities, which was not something the people making the decision to cover up could have known), but maybe not.
It clearly would have been much (much etc.) better than being known as the university that knowningly covered for him, but even better than that (from a PR standpoint) would be not to be known as the Home of the Fighting Child Rapist at all.
(The above is not to be taken as an endorsement of the decision to cover up the crimes, which was a despicable moral choice.)
On the other hand, the Baylor story did have a direct relationship to breaking NCAA competitiveness rules (paying “non-scholarship” players); while the “institutional controls” phrasing does give the NCAA justification for taking action in the PSU case, it’s not nearly as close a fit to more typical NCAA infractions as the Baylor case was.
I tend to think that Penn State’s crimes are too unique to easily compare to SMU and other programs that have gotten whacked. SMU got caught cheating, was punished, then almost immediately started cheating again. In that case, the NCAA felt it had to do something drastic to get the school’s attention and change the culture there. In PSU’s case, you could argue that the institutional culture encourages misdeeds by its willingness to sweep horrible crimes under the rug and the NCAA should make an example of them. But do you really think a potential child molester at, let’s say Michigan, is going to think “Oh no, Penn St. got the death penalty, I better not touch any kids!”? If everything else about the program has been aboveboard, are you fairly addressing the institutional culture by suspending the football program, or is it just vengeance?
Yes, that’s true.
It’s not about Sandusky, it’s about all the top guys covering up his crimes. It’s the president of Michigan saying “Oh no, we’re not keeping this quiet, let’s get out in front of it, take our lumps now instead of getting hit 10x as hard for covering it up.”
ETA: in the Baylor wiki page, it mentions the NCAA praising the school for quick action once the violations came to light. I suspect if the higherups were part of the problem, Baylor would have been hit harder.
No.
Deterrence.
Obviously we’ll never know. Nonetheless, I’m going by the fact I live two miles from campus, and even today there are a percentage of people who honestly believe Joe did everything he could, because they desperately want to believe that Joe was always as good as he appeared to be.
I can’t predict the worldwide reaction, but in the context of the effects specifically on the football program I think we can mostly focus on the students, alumni, and fans, most of whom I believe would react as I’ve said.
No. You can’t deter a criminal by punishing a bunch of people who are at best tangentially associated with that criminal.
“Ooh, that guy on city council was dealing drugs, and he was a buddy of the mayor so it didn’t get prosecuted. We’d better evict every resident of the town, for DETERRENCE.”
Yes, you can, as has been pointed out a dozen times in this thread. You can, because if the higher-ups are deterred from covering it up, the perp can be prevented from committing more crimes.