Some important things happened this week at Pennsylvania State University. A nurse treated a broken bone at the medical campus in Hershey. A student learned how to use differential equations in a classroom in Erie. In the Paterno Library, the center of the University Park campus in State College, a librarian helped a student do research for a history paper.
Meanwhile, over in Indianapolis, NCAA President Mark Emmert announced punitive measures against Penn State’s football program in the wake of the devastating accounts of malfeasance by university leaders and coach Joe Paterno in dealing with revelations that former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky had raped children for years — sometimes in the school’s athletic facilities.
Emmert fined the university $60 million, banned it from postseason play for four years, cut the number of football scholarships it may offer, and vacated all wins since 1998, when Paterno first learned of Sandusky’s crimes.
The NCAA penalties could have been worse. The program could have suffered the “death penalty,” the cancellation of the entire football program for a number of years.
This punishment is the best thing that could have happened to Penn State. Well, it’s the second best. The best thing would have been for the NCAA to issue a death penalty and for Emmert to avoid grandstanding about how his organization was concerned that programs like Penn State were “too big to fail” and that “these events should serve as a call to every single school and athletics department to take an honest look at its campus environment and eradicate the ‘sports are king’ mind-set that can so dramatically cloud the judgment of educators.” No one takes Emmert seriously when he claims to represent the values of education over athletics. But still, the entire Penn State community has the opportunity to live up to that ideal now. Penn State is a university, not a football program.
In 1989, the NCAA handed the University of Oklahoma a series of sanctions for recruiting violations and a general culture of mismanagement led by coach Barry Switzer. The big news that precipitated those sanctions included a star player being arrested while trying to sell cocaine to an undercover FBI agent.
Five years later, the university hired former Sen. David Boren to be its president. Since then, Oklahoma has grown in stature as a major research university. Along the way, the football team came back to prominence, winning a national championship in 2000. Those 1989 sanctions helped the university right itself and focus on rebuilding its academic and athletic reputations. Everyone who has graduated from Oklahoma since 1989 should be grateful.
Penn State does not have to work that hard to convince people that it is a top-flight academic institution. Most important, Penn State’s presence across the state offers it daily and powerful evidence of the service it provides and the lives it improves.
We Americans take these institutions for granted. We make them scramble for funds and recognition through outlets such as football that have the ability to corrupt. Football need not corrupt a university. It can be one of the best ways to connect alumni and the community to the institution. And, in rare cases such as Penn State, Texas and Oklahoma, football can make money for a university.
Keeping football in perspective, recognizing that universities exploit student athletes horribly, and avoiding the unhealthy adoration that some coaches receive is not easy. The temptations of corruption are great. But at least at Penn State University, for the next decade or so, the community is relieved of that temptation. Penn State football can start over and serve as a model program, without the unhealthy cult of personality. In the mean time, Penn State alumni, students, faculty and leadership will just have to boast about what happens in the labs, libraries and classrooms.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.
