“The evil that men do lives after them;
“The good is oft interred with their bones.”
— Mark Antony eulogizing Julius Caesar in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
Joe Paterno was a student of the classics. You can be sure that he read Julius Caesar and you can be sure he was familiar with Mark Antony’s words.
The good that Paterno did — winning a lot of football games while graduating his players, endowing a chair in the English department dedicated to teaching the classics, building a university with an impeccable academic tradition — wasn’t interred with his bones. Evidence of it is everywhere.
But the evil that he did — and, examining the evidence compiled in former FBI director Louis Freeh’s report about the child sex abuse scandal at the university, it was evil — will live on, a legacy of 14 years of children being preyed upon by a serial pedophile, a man who had been in Paterno’s employ for some three decades.
That evil will live on in the horrific memories and tortured psyches of Jerry Sandusky’s victims.
That evil will live on as an entire generation will come to associate Penn State not with football excellence, but with a scandal that resulted in the most vulnerable among us being horrifically abused as men in positions of power covered it up.
That evil will live on.
And that evil may bury whatever good Paterno accomplished with his bones. That is not to say Paterno was an evil man. But he did commit an evil act. Along with other top university officials … well, here is what Freeh had to say about it:
“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State. The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized.”
Two words jump out at you: “total disregard.”
Later in his statement, Freeh referred to the “callous and shocking disregard” of the victims in this case.
Freeh’s report concluded: “There is an over-emphasis on ‘The Penn State Way’ as an approach to decision-making, a resistance to seeking outside perspectives, and an excessive focus on athletics that can, if not recognized, negatively impact the university’s reputation as a progressive institution.”
Freeh’s investigators found what many of us already knew — that Penn State is an insular place, an island, a bubble-enclosed kingdom cloaked in secrecy.
The Freeh report concluded that in 1998, when allegations about Sandusky were investigated, Paterno knew about them and allowed Sandusky “to retire in 1999, not as a suspected child predator, but as a valued member of the Penn State football legacy, with future ‘visibility’ at Penn State and ‘ways to continue to work with young people through Penn State,’ essentially granting him a license to bring boys to campus facilities for ‘grooming’ as targets for his assaults.”
The university was dealing with another scandal in 1998. According to the Freeh report, the university discovered that a sports agent had bought one of Penn State’s football players $400 worth of clothes.
The administration took swift action, banning the agent from campus for life.
So a pedophile was allowed to retire “as a valued member of the Penn State football legacy” but an agent who bought $400 worth of clothes for the player was not tolerated.
That kind of evil lives on, long after good goes to the grave.
