Shocking Truth About Joe Paterno, Penn State & Gov. Tom
Corbett and Today's Big-Time College Football

  * The Shocking Truth About Joe Paterno, Penn State and
    Governor Tom Corbett (Dave Zirin in The Nation)
  * Louis Freeh Flags "Culture of Reverence" for Big-Time
    College Football (Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive)

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The Shocking Truth About Joe Paterno, Penn State and Governor
Tom Corbett

by Dave Zirin

The Nation.com Blog
July 12, 2012 

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168853/breaking-news-shocking-truth-about-joe-paterno-penn-state-and-gov-tom-corbett#

	"It is very simple: Joe Paterno was a criminal."   
	  -Jeff Passan, Yahoo Sports

After seven months, 400 interviews and the review of more than
3.5 million documents, Louis Freeh has completed his report on
the dark underside of Penn State University, and it will stun
even the most cynical among us. The former FBI director was
given, we were told, "free rein" to investigate the
institutional failures that compelled school President Graham
Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, director of campus
police Gary Schultz and legendary football coach Joe Paterno,
to cover up allegations that revered former assistant football
coach Jerry Sandusky was a serial child predator. In the
immediate wake of Sandusky's conviction on forty-five counts
of various acts of child abuse, Freeh's 267-page report is
shocking for what it reveals and shocking, frankly, for what
it doesn't reveal. The report constitutes nothing less than a
death blow to the school's reputation. Its conclusions, that
those in positions of power at Penn State showed a "total
disregard" for the safety of vulnerable children, will echo
for years. We can reasonably expect this school with a $4.6
billion budget, a $1.8 billion endowment and 96,000 students
to be inalterably crippled for the foreseeable future. Civil
lawsuits, criminal lawsuits and hot pressure on the NCAA to
shut down the lucrative football program will all result from
this report. It also, as suspected, constitutes a death blow
to what was left of the reputation of the most successful,
respected coach in the history of college football, Joe
Paterno. There were many cynical about the report before its
release, saying, "We'll learn that Joe Paterno covered up
Sandusky's child abuse to protect the football program. We
already knew this." But there is so much in the report we
didn't know. We didn't know, as Freeh writes on page 39, that
"several staff members and football coaches regularly observed
Sandusky showering with young boys" before May 1998.

We didn't know that there was evidence Joe Paterno knew about
formal allegations against Sandusky as far back as 1998, four
years before his assistant Mike McQueary walked in on Sandusky
raping an 11-year-old boy in the Penn State showers, and then
reported it to the coach. A supposedly shocked Paterno told
Washington Post reporter Sally Jenkins shortly before his
death that he didn't know what to do upon hearing McQueary's
story because he'd "never heard of rape and a man."

We didn't know that when Sandusky was forced into retirement
in 1999, he received in Freeh's words, "an unusual lump sum
payment of $168,000" as well as full use of team facilities.

We didn't know that Paterno, well aware of every sick
allegation, wanted Sandusky in 1999 to stay as "Volunteer
Position Director - Positive Action for Youth."

We didn't know that Sandusky had the gall to ask the school to
open, in his name, a football camp for middle school boys.

And most criminally, we didn't know, according to Freeh, that
in 2001 Schultz and Curley agreed to go to authorities but
changed their mind after Curley discussed their plan with
Paterno. At one point, Spanier said that if Sandusky quietly
sought help, they'd turn a blind eye.

As Freeh commented, "Our most saddening and sobering finding
is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of
Sandusky's child victims. The most powerful men at Penn State
failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children
who Sandusky victimized."

He also accuses Spanier, Curley, Schultz and Paterno of
"opting out" of complying with the Cleary Act, the federal law
that mandates colleges report crime. That criminal accusation
in plain black and white will become a staple of lawsuits for
years if not decades.One Penn State alum tweeted this morning,
"If you want to take a picture with a Joe Paterno statue, you
had better do it now."

But the report is also striking for what it doesn't discuss,
mainly the role of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett. Louis
Freeh is someone who has always been a proud lieutenant of
institutional power, and with this report he doesn't
disappoint. As I wrote after the Sandusky verdict,

    The Governor is far from an innocent bystander. As the
    state's attorney general in 2009, Corbett headed a state
    investigation into accusations against the revered former
    coach. Although his office denies it, there are multiple
    confirmations that Corbett assigned no one from his office
    to follow up on the charges: just one state trooper, a
    state trooper "not authorized to bring charges against
    Sandusky." In addition, when Corbett was sworn in as
    governor in 2011, he still had not informed The Second
    Mile Foundation that their founder was under
    investigation. Instead, as a candidate for governor, he
    took $650,000 in donations from members of the Second
    Mile's unknowing board, even allowing their chairman to
    hold a fundraiser for his campaign. Upon being elected,
    Corbett then moved deftly from doing nothing to
    immediately try to deflect the entire weight of the
    scandal onto Joe Paterno and Penn State itself, using his
    recently appointed position as a member of the school's
    Board of Trustees (an automatic appointment for all
    Pennsylvania Governors) to do so.

As bracing as the Freeh report is, it confirms what we long
suspected and Penn State will pay the price. But it's also
bracing that the dead and the indicted get the blame, while
the sitting governor gets to have press conferences and praise
Freeh for his efforts. I hope that Sandusky's victims leave
room in their deserved litigious appetites for Governor
Corbett. We should all hope he has to answer for the banality
of his own evil. If that's difficult for Corbett to handle,
maybe he should take the advice he gave to women upset about
his support for mandatory vaginal ultrasounds and he can just
lie back and "close his eyes."

[Dave Zirin was named one of UTNE Reader's "50 Visionaries Who
Are Changing Our World," Dave Zirin is the sports editor for
The Nation magazine. Zirin is a frequent guest on MSNBC, ESPN
and Democracy Now! He also hosts his own weekly Sirius XM
show, Edge of Sports Radio. His books include What's My Name
Fool? (Haymarket Books), A People's History of Sports in the
United States (the New Press), Bad Sports: How Owners Are
Ruining the Games We Love (Scribner) and co-author of the
forthcoming The John Carlos Story. You can find all his work
at www.edgeofsports.com ]

==========

Louis Freeh Flags "Culture of Reverence" for Big-Time College
Football

By Matthew Rothschild

The Progressive
July 12, 2012

http://www.progressive.org/freeh_flags_big_time_college_football.html

Louis Freeh's special investigative report to Penn State is
about as damning an indictment of a university management team
as you could find.

He charges that the former President of the University, the
former vice president, the former athletic director, and Joe
Paterno all "exhibited a striking lack of empathy for
Sandusky's victims." And they all were more worried about bad
publicity for the university and the football program than
they were about the fate of Sandusky's victims, he claims.

This disgusting scandal was - and remains - shocking because
of the moral turpitude that men in positions of power and
responsibility exhibited when confronted with evidence of
grotesque behavior by one of their employees.

Freeh, the former FBI director, pointed a lot of fingers,
including at the old university president, who didn't brook
dissent, and at the board, which didn't perform due diligence.

These two factors, combined with moral myopia, could lead to a
scandal at any institution - corporate, nonprofit, academic.

But Freeh also pointed a finger at a specific institution,
big-time college football, and the elevated status it had at
Penn State.

He cited a "culture of reverence for the football program that
is ingrained at all levels of the campus community."

This "culture of reverence for the football program" reigns
supreme not just at Happy Valley but at colleges around the
country.

Highly profitable football programs, with their highly paid
celebrity coaches, too often become little fiefdoms. The TV
revenues and alumni donations they bring in provide university
administrators with a huge institutional incentive to avert
their eyes.

And so in these fiefdoms, the customary concern for what is
kosher can too easily go out the window, inviting all kinds of
horrors to fly right in.

The administrators of Penn State are not alone in their moral
turpitude.

If administrators don't heed the lessons here, there will be
scandals aplenty in bit-time college football to come.

I only hope they are not as gruesome as this one.

[Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine,
which is one of the leading voices for peace and social
justice in this country. Rothschild has appeared on Nightline,
C-SPAN, The O'Reilly Factor, and NPR, and his newspaper
commentaries have run in the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times,
the Miami Herald, and a host of other newspapers. Rothschild
is also the author of a book entitled You Have No Rights:
Stories of America in Our Repressive Age (New Press, 2007). A
graduate of Harvard University, Rothschild prior to coming to
The Progressive worked as the editor of Multinational Monitor,
a magazine founded by Ralph Nader. Rothschild came to The
Progressive in 1983...]

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