Penn State Thoughts

Colleagues, friends, and fellow Twitterers have been asking me my thoughts on the Penn State saga over the past few days, and I’ve remained mostly mum. I tend not to speak when I feel like my words would be redundant – we are a nation full of sports coverage all saying the same things.

But now that we are a few days into the mess (and that’s truly what it is, a mess), I finally have some quick insights that aren’t hackneyed. Most of these come more from the educational administrator part of me, and less from the sports consumer/writer side, but I hope you’ll find them useful.

The Mob Mentality of College Students – College students will gather en masse for anything except truly useful things. I learned this first as a student government executive board member, had it hammered home as a resident assistant, and live with it as a reality as a professional. The most powerful and informative programs will draw two students, and a flash mob in center campus will draw 500. It is a conundrum that hundreds of higher education administrators have tried to solve for years, but despite coming close, no one has ever found the golden answer.

Students are going to gather in large groups when there is an element of risk and when they know administrators aren’t behind it. Consider it their version of jumping out of a plane or making out with someone you met two hours ago in the backseat of a car at Lookout Point – it’s dangerous, stupid, but gosh darn it, it’s a rush of adrenaline to do something you aren’t supposed to do. Why else do you explain my residence hall at Binghamton University “rioting” (milling about and cheering, not really rioting) in the parking lot after Syracuse won the 2003 Final Four? It was truly stupid – why were we celebrating the school up Route 81 winning a basketball championship? (Because we weren’t post-season eligible and never thought our school would make the big dance, so we adopted the Orange. Makes no sense now, but did at age 21.)

I’m not defending what the students did in any way – they look like horribly confused and morally corrupt human beings by doing so, and their activities were truly dangerous  – but I honestly believe most will eventually regret doing it. Most of them probably justified participating by saying, “I just came outside to see what was going on,” and hopefully will learn the lesson that what the large group is doing is not always the best option. The administration of Penn State could have done a few things to lessen the mob. For example, that Trustees press conference didn’t need to be at 10pm, which is prime procrastination time for students. Have that presser at 8am, and your rioting would have been lessened. You would have less of the bystander participation, which is what fueled that fire.

Emotions – To fully grasp how residents of the community of Penn State must feel, I think you can best relate this to the range of emotions felt in individual parishes during Catholic Church sex scandals. I grew up in the Church, so I saw some of this first hand.

Your priest, especially when you were lucky enough to have one that stayed for years (a rarity in the late 1990s as generations of them retired and a shortage resulted), was someone you trusted for anything and everything. So when a scandal involved your priest, you were devastated. The parishioners would have a range of emotions with one truth behind each individual reaction: you couldn’t really understand why the priest did what he did. How you reacted to that truth was different for every person, but it was akin to the priest passing away – he no longer was the person you knew. That trustworthy persona you knew was dead.

This is exactly what’s going on with Penn State. I know several people from the area, and Penn State football is their regional cultural identity. It is their secular Saturday religion (which raises all sorts of issues for theologians, but that’s another topic for another day.) And Joe Paterno is like their priest. And no matter what each residents’ reaction is, there is one truth behind it: they don’t know how those people could do what they did. For some people, that results in a rational thought; in others, it results in a denial; and in most people from the region, it results in swirling middle ground of acknowledgement of the awfulness, but a personal grief for the ideal that was and no longer is.

Internal vs. External – There are some in this world that believe that when abuse or hurt occurs by the hand of an known entity, it is best dealt with internally, without using the external manner for punishment and investigation that societies have set up for such a thing. These people think that processing the abuse should be done within the victim’s self, and that the family or group should handle punishing (or not punishing and just acknowledging) the perpetrator internally. They take their own “action,” and then never speak again of what happened. This is a very Old World mentality that some Americans still hold to, and you see it represented by those with the opinion that no one except the physical abuser should be punished in the Penn State situation.

To a victim, that is like being hurt all over again. Victims want their feelings acknowledged, to be believed and to know it can’t happen again. And when the accused doesn’t go through any substantive punishment process, the hurt’s haunting lingers within the victim with an increased drumbeat. It could happen again, it could happen worst than last time, and no one will do anything to help, because no one did anything to help last time.

The Old World mentality that “somethings are better handled internally” that leads to abuse being swept under the rug needs to go. Internal handling breaks down the victim’s ability to trust. A victim’s trust was betrayed by someone hurting them, and so how can one ask them to trust that the accused is being handled appropriately internally?

So to hear some say that situations like Penn State’s are best handled internally is a knife in the heart and a punch in the gut. It’s a type of denial that lets the remnants of abuse hallow out the victim. How can anyone actually want that to occur?