A Failure of Leadership

ESPN:

During an extraordinary 45-minute news conference Thursday, Freeh said the janitors' fear of speaking up about a young boy's abuse is a telling indictment about the all-powerful culture of Penn State's football program. "They were afraid to take on the football program," Freeh said. "The university would circle around it. It was like going against the president of the United States. If that is the culture on the bottom, God help the culture on the top."
Page after page, damning conclusion after damning conclusion, the Freeh report lays out the story of a stunning and systemic failure of leadership. The evidence contained in the report, including emails from 1998 and 2001 when Spanier, Paterno, Schultz and Curley concealed the Sandusky allegations, is devastating to the reputations and legacies of each.
"In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity," the report states, "the most powerful leaders at the university -- Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley -- repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse."
In 2001, when then-assistant coach Mike McQueary reported an assault in the shower that he had witnessed to Paterno, the coach told him, "You did what you had to do. It's my job now to figure out what we want to do."
Paterno's decade-old words -- It's my job now to figure out what we want to do -- hang over the entire Freeh Group's report, indicating that the powerful coach and the university's leaders each had an array of choices to make about what to do about Sandusky, going back 14 years. Almost always, they chose to say or do little or nothing about Sandusky, seemingly more concerned about the "humane" response to Sandusky, as Spanier said in a February 2001 email, rather than how the longtime defensive coach's actions might be affecting children.
Freeh also charges that Paterno, Curley, McQueary, Spanier and Schultz failed to comply with the federal Clery Act by not reporting the 2001 incident to university police.

Penn State's leadership decided to follow the lead of the Roman Catholic Church and to conceal the fact that they knew a sexual predator was taking advantage of children.  The fact that the University President and Athletic Director deferred to the head football coach says all that needs to be said about the arrangement of priorities at big-time college football campuses.  It is just the worst example yet of athletics trumping decency at universities.  Look at Notre Dame's handling of accusations of rape committed by football players, or Gordon Gee's terrible joke that it was more of a question whether Jim Tressel would fire him than if he would fire Jim Tressel for other cases.  All of these incidents show misplaced priorities.

But the fall of Joe Paterno is the biggest failure yet.  His family may be trying to protect his image, but they are trying to bucket water out of the ocean.  He built his reputation on the idea that he was a successful coach, but that he was a better person.  And yet, when it came time to make a tough decision which would bring shame to his football program, and would ruin one of his friends, he chose to protect his friend and his program's reputation.  Because of that decision, several boys were allowed to be sexually assaulted.  Now, besides the damage done to those boys, and the financial damage which will befall the university, Joe Paterno will be remembered as the coach who protected a sexual predator.  That is a sad legacy for 61 years of work.