On Joe Paterno and Morality
by Epictetus on Jan 23, 2012 8:43 AM EST
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PrintI would like to preface this by saying that I am not a PSU football fan. In fact, as a fan of a pre-expansion Big 10 school, I actively pull for PSU's opponents far more often than not.
In the mountain of stuff that I have read about Paterno, it seems to me that a couple of fundamental points have not been addressed. I feel moved the day after Joe's passing to try and articulate them.
1. Among some, there seems to be this belief that in the eyes of glory-seeking fans, Joe's accomplishments in the win-loss column as a football coach shielded him from the moral consequences of his actions. This line of criticism fails to place sufficient weight in the moral dimension of Joe's accomplishments. Yes, he won a lot of games, but he also had an outsized role in shaping for the better, the characters of thousands of young men who played for him. More importantly, he dedicated his life to improving an institution that touches the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in every way available to him. Even as a non-academic, Joe was a builder of an academic institution and that has an enormous moral dimension to it that needs to be thrown into the moral calculus over what happened to those poor boys.
2. It appears (and of course is subject to new facts coming to light) that Paterno's failure was not the direct result of a moral failing but rather the result of a failure of judgment. This was almost certainly not a case where there was an intent to deliberately mislead or cover up to save himself. Nor was Joe's failure to take additional action the result of an absence of courage. Rather, this seems to be simply a miscalculation of how best to deal with this situation. In fact, Joe dealt with it as someone who has devoted his life to bettering Penn State would be expected to, by running it up the institutional chain of command. Should he have followed up or personally intervened? In hindsight the answer is clearly yes. He can and should be criticized for this failure of judgment, but he should not be characterized as some sort of moral monster that tried to put football over molested boys.
3. This mistake of judgment however did stem from a certain and lesser moral failing, that of hubris. Joe hung on well past the appropriate time for him to go. You could make the argument that in the last years, Penn State was being used to build up Joe rather than Joe continuing to be effective in building up Penn State. if you are Joe, you owe it to the institution that you have worked so hard to support not to be a liability to it. Joe did truly seem to be blind to this, and did not have the self-awareness to walk away gracefully. I guess when people say that perhaps he died of a broken heart, it may well have been his acute awareness of this point in the end that really sapped his will.
The whole thing reads like a Greek Tragedy. In the final analysis, Joe was a great man who contributed in incalculable ways (tangibly and intangiby) to the community, the University and to the people who worked with him directly. He should be remembered that way, but also as an object lesson in the need to leave when it is time. I guess this is his final life lesson to all of us.
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Well stated
The crux of the matter is that right or wrong, he stayed on too long due to his fear of dying like Coach Bryant did. The difference was Bryant was in ill health well before his retirement – had Paterno left 3-7 years ago, he would not have been.
I'm not really a CPA, I just play one on television.
This seems pretty spidery
but the crux of the matter is not his failure to leave Penn State gracefully. It is the underlying scandal that required him to leave in the first place. I’m going to respectfully disagree if you think Joe Paterno’s greatest sin was his failure to leave Penn State gracefully. The underlying scandal is not an object lesson in graceful retirement strategies, but a reminder that we all need to do more to protect children from bad people.
by Skin Patrol on Jan 23, 2012 10:35 AM EST up reply actions
No-not what I meant.
Had he left much earlier, rather than trying to hang on and break records and “avoid dying”, he would possibly avoided making the poor decisions that killed him. There’s no excusing his handling of the matter, but he was also of a different generation, one that followed the rules.
I'm not really a CPA, I just play one on television.
What was the poor decision that killed him? (Do you mean his career?)
His moral error occurred in 2002, and he still won national coach of the year honors after that, so I think it would have been a bit early for his retirement.
by Skin Patrol on Jan 23, 2012 10:56 AM EST up reply actions
He Should Have Left 15 Years Ago
The point is that he hung on way too long and was not capable of making the judgments that he had as a younger, more vital man.
Vandy football - taking the need for stoicism to previously unimagined heights
by Epictetus on Jan 23, 2012 11:25 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs
No, no, no, no.
“In fact, Joe dealt with it as someone who has devoted his life to bettering Penn State would be expected to, by running it up the institutional chain of command.”
Titles aside, the notion that the chain of command regarding Penn State athletics ended with anyone other than Joe Paterno is false.
Reducing Paterno’s lack of action to a simple error in judgment minimizes what was, yes, a legitimate moral failure, regardless of his very laudable accomplishments.
by JoeDawg15 on Jan 23, 2012 10:37 AM EST reply actions 3 recs
The only difference between Paterno and Bryant in terms of power was...
…Bryant held the position of athletic director, in Paterno’s case he had the power without the title (and as such felt that telling his superior of what he heard was “doing his job”). Yes, I know there are lots of other cases where individuals just “did their jobs” and atrocities happened.
I'm not really a CPA, I just play one on television.
This is exactly correct
I think Joe felt like it was something he was not qualified to handle and sent it up to his boss. It is actually a little simlar to Tressel’s situation where he felt like geting involved in an on-going criminal investigation was not something he could deal with as a football coach. In both cases, this way of thinking backfired on them. In both cases, the problem was bad judgment (of course the results of the bad judgment are not analogous).
Vandy football - taking the need for stoicism to previously unimagined heights
I hit enter
prematurely as one of my executive overlings came in.
Paterno used to be AD; and the logic that some of my fellow fans fling around that he would have been afraid to do more or follow up because he might be fired is just ridiculous beneath contempt.
Holy Crap
Mike Dahmus…you and I spent months flaming on each other some 20 years ago on Usenet. At the time I was outraged that Penn State had joined the Big 10 because I thought it would set about the ruination of college football. Damned if events have not proven me correct.
If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.
Dahmus?
Holy fucksticks. How goes?
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A rapturous delight the likes of which we have never before seen.
If we have another one like it, it might just kill me.
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You would get a chuckle
out of BSD – where 90% of the commenters think I’m not a real PSU fan because I’m constantly trying to make them stop apologist and denialist bullshit.
Keep up the good fight...
I gave up in the mid-90s – people who thought the ‘95 and ’96 teams should be national contenders just can’t be reasoned with.
I actually kept an eye on it when this broke, until despair set in and I had to quit looking.
I can understand a sense of desperation, trying to pretend the cesspool smells like lavender. There’s even a certain extent to which I’m willing to engage in a little apologism; after all, I doubt there’s any of us that have never been faced with a situation where a decision on our part impacts a number of people (be it three or three thousand or anywhere in between) where we dropped the ball and fucked everything up.
But there’s a difference between trying to be fair to the guy and blindly insisting this whole mess has been unfair. I can sit here and make a thousand-word argument as to why it’s entirely possible that Paterno acted in complete concert with what he believed to be the right and proper course of action here, and that argument will be utterly unassailable. I can also make a thousand-word argument as to why it’s entirely possible he knew all along and was just playing CYA, and that argument will be unassailable.
Which unfortunately means that seeing either argument presented as what someone actually believes to be true an exercise in frustration for me. We don’t, and now never will, know. We’re never going to get an answer to questions nobody thought to ask Paterno, like “Joe, there are policies about dealing with this sort of thing which are designed the way they are for certain reasons. Can you explain to us exactly what you thought those policies were, what specific things were stressed to you when being educated on the policies, and how what you were told impacted your decision on how to respond to this?”
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yeah, not buying it
You can buy the “did what he thought was right” argument the first few days. Years later, when Sandusky is still around campus and still hanging out with kids at his charity, you pretty much have to go check up on what actually happened – if you care at all, which he apparently did not (enough).
He said so himself, by the way; but some of my fellow fans are still blinded by worship to admit it. He told Jenkins he never followed up, ever. (No, asking McQueary once if he was OK with what happened is not following up; asking the people who were supposedly investigating is what is meant here – McQueary has a raft of logical reasons to clam up when nothing happened).
Here's the ONLY thing I would question about that
and it’s only because I’ve got experience in the reporting chain process.
If you are NOT the eyewitness (or not the person reporting what you suspect may be abuse, for example a kid with an unexplained bruise), you’re actually not really supposed to try and follow up. There’s a lot of reasons behind it, none of which have anything to do with “covering corporate ass” and everything to do with “not hindering an investigation by sticking your nose in it”.
However, even if you are not the eyewitness, if you think there is clear and present danger you are still allowed, under any permutation of this policy, to contact the police. Now, if you aren’t the eyewitness, there’s a form for doing this: “So-and-so, who reports to me, claims to have witnessed a [potential] incident of abuse. Please contact so-and-so to discuss it.” No more, no less, by the way; if you, as a person who did not witness it yourself and therefore have nothing to offer the police by way of testimony get involved in trying to tell them what you were told happened… well, you get the clusterfuck in the grand jury proceedings which now leaves Sandusky’s attorneys an opening to question McQ’s credibility. And then you stay out of it.
But the catch here is that you stay out of it once you’ve informed the police. If you have actually called the fucking police, then you can legitimately say “I have done my duty”, because we the public can comprehend “the police were on the case, and I’m not going to harass the police to see if they’ve done anything about something I didn’t witness myself”. We can’t comprehend “I told my boss about it”, even when that’s the legally mandated course of action.
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Those policies
are designed to protect employees like the mail room guy from possibly getting fired or other retaliatory stuff.
They’re not designed for the titular head of Football, Inc.
As the captain of the ship, he had a responsibility to everybody working there to follow up – and this is assuming your statements about hindering the investigation are just taken 100% to be the gospel truth.
Institutionally, you are exactly correct.
Again, the issue is to what extent Penn State educated their employees regarding the procedure. I am NOT handwaving Paterno’s cuplability here; I am just pointing out there are things we don’t know which may serve to render him guilty only of failing to comprehend that the policies did not prohibit him from contacting the police himself.
Assuming they had any actual policies in the first place, or that they were properly disseminated to the faculty. I’m cynical enough to believe nobody had a clue, primarily because McQueary didn’t immediately comprehend that he was required to tell Paterno on an institutional level. He had to ask his dad what to do.
The real problem here, above and beyond any lack of judgment, is how we prepare people to handle these things. There are places where the institution does cover this stuff in in-service, and even then they sometimes screw it up; I’ve seen people react to this who honestly yet incorrectly believe that they cannot call the police even if they witness it, because they’re told to move it up the chain. On the other hand, I’ve seen people rage and rant about why Paterno himself didn’t thoroughly investigate this entire matter himself, which is just as wrongheaded and stupid.
It crushes me that all anyone wants to do is debate whether Paterno was a martyr, a guy who tried to do the right thing, a guy who screwed up, or Satan incarnate, but NOBODY is talking about what might well have been the underlying problem to begin with — and still IS an underlying problem at thousands of institutions across the country, regardless of this mess.
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by jonfmorse on Jan 27, 2012 1:47 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
Thank you for
a reasonable, centrist view. I doubt you will move M1EK towards center, since he seems comfortable only at the fringes of ‘debates’. He bas been loudly beating the ‘get rid of Paterno’ drum for at least 5 or 6 years now, and I think he now believes he has ammunition in sufficient caliber and quantity to support his crusade. I think any current, firmly locked down opinion on this whole matter is premature and requires some subjective assumptions (both for and against culpability) I expect my viewpoint will remain in flux somewhere between 60/40 and 40/60 for the next year or so as things develop/resolve. I figure as time passes, the shrillest voices will move on to other topics ‘du jour’ and the judgement of the remainder will coalesce along more rational/objective/factual lines.
Alea iacta est...
It will probably disappoint you to know
that the one aspect of all of this that I don’t think is debatable regardless of the cause of Paterno’s misjudgment was that he HAD to go. Even if there were an explanation for his inaction which was completely plausible and acceptable (such potential explanations exist, but we never got one that matched and now never will), he still had to get out of the direct spotlight. Mike’s absolutely correct about that.
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And the biggest issue on "judgment" tends to be when you accredit his knowledge
if you think it was just the McCleary thing he ran up the ladder and failed to do anything to follow up, that’s one thing. But others think it goes deeper than that, and the the 98 investigation, followed by Sandusky’s premature retirement, screams a prior knowledge that goes much deeper than the grad assistant walking in on the shower stuff. And if you attribute his knowledge that far back, the numerous actions from that date scream a lot louder than just bad judgment and to a much, much larger moral issue. While he still did a lot of good, there was more than enough there to see flaws.
All in all, treating simple men, especially men who sometimes comprimise certain areas for success as high level coaches tend to do, but treating these men as Gods on earth, which Penn Staters appear to have done, is a very bad thing, and can lead to extremely worse things. They are men, and coaches, not infallible deities.
http://sportsandgrits.com/
This is what I can't get past...
Why was Sandusky pushed out in ‘99? There were rumors around town at that time. One (abortive) investigation had taken place. I couldn’t imagine someone not whispering to Joe “hey – we’re looking at Jerry”. The story of Jerry being told “You’ll never be head coach here” is legendary – but no one has ever asked “why?”.
Maybe it’s all coincidence, but I have a hard time getting there because of Joe’s propensity for control and how small a town that is.
Nope - generally gave up on BSD save some lurking and an occasional post.
I’ll just stand by what I heard during my time in State College (which included 1998 and 1999). Heard from two different sources (one long-time townie and a then-current defensive player and long time friend) that JS was asked to leave because of “personal conduct issues”.
I knew then that I was probably getting a shorter and/or sanitized version of the truth. It was last Fall when I realized just how sanitized and short that version was. Now did these friends know all the details? Maybe, maybe not – but there certainly were suspicions harbored as to whether JS was on the up-and-up as early as ’98.
It sure would be nice
for people like you to share that info on BSD instead of letting yours truly be the sole piñata on this stuff.
Just don't have the will for that scene
No one is as deaf as he who will not listen. You’ll never make converts of the zealots in their own house. If the tone were more like here, I’d do so. I just have no inclination to put forth the effort on such deaf ears.
Glass Houses
I have made bad decisions in my life. I haven’t dealt with anything this damaging and fortunately in a similar case I would know what to do because of training. I don’t think I would have known exactly how to handle this particular situation perfectly without training. I also think you have to factor Paterno’s age into this. His generation simply did not talk about things like this. I can imagine it was difficult for McGloin to even get through tell JoePa what exactly took place. In summation I hope Paterno’s legacy is not based on one bad (albeit very bad) decision.
I was over-served.
I don't know about the generational gap...
things like this happened… The man studied the Greek classics, so you can’t tell me the concept wasn’t in his mind. Knowing about it and talking about it are different, but the gravity of the situation had to be impressed upon his mind, particularly with the Catholic Church’s legal issues of the past 15-20 years (which Paterno as a well read man and Catholic would have some knowledge).
Grew up a fan of a pre-expansion Big10 team and went to PSU just after they joined...
Some comments on your thoughts:
As someone who went to Penn State but was raised in another equally strong tradition (Michigan and Bo), I always looked at Joe through the lens of Bo and marked his achievements as much in what he did to develop those young men and the university as well as his wins and losses. Like Bo, Joe was great, but he wasn’t perfect – he lost games, he swore, he had lapses in sportsmanship (see Rutgers in ‘95); but on balance, he was far greater on the positive side of the ledger. However, the huge fanboi contingent that can’t understand why a multi-billion dollar enterprise had to let him go frustrate me as much as moral contingent that screamed to shut the football program down. You capture the essence of this well.
Your second point is plausible, but I don’t think it reflects just how much water Paterno drew in that town and at that school. Considering his considerable sway and his propensity for dropping in on classes (to check on his players’ attendence) and other such “management by walking around”, I can’t believe that he raised the issue and simply forgot to follow up or trusted it was in good hands. The subject matter of the issue is too significant for that to happen. Coupled with the timing of Sandusky’s departure in ’99, just after the first, abortive attempt to investigate a claim of impropriety, there are just too many red flags to give a pass. He may not be a monster, but – as he noted – he should have done more.
Personally, I thought Joe should have hung it up after 99 or 05, at the latest. However, I don’t think that the off-field mess has anything to do with his hanging around – though the on-field product and recruiting have suffered somewhat. If Joe didn’t want to / couldn’t control this thing, it’s doubtful that a new coach would have gotten different results from the same obfuscating or dawdling administrators. Though I do agree with your overall statement, that we all can learn from Joe as his final life lesson that timing is everything.
by Cock D on Jan 26, 2012 10:27 AM EST reply actions 1 recs
There is no doubt that even in his old age
Joe was a wily old fox. I still think though that his use of wiliness was confined to trying to obfuscate his role after he realized that he had dropped the ball on following up. One thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that Sandusky is the real criminal here, and one of his victims is Joe who trusted him to operate as his representative. It seems to me as an outside observer that there is a lot of conflating of Joe’s culpability in not allowing himself to be removed over the years and Sandusky’s culpability in actually committing the crime. I think there was a lot of pent up frustration that he wouldn’t leave and when this thing broke, it was the final straw for the Board.
If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.
Amen to that - particularly Sandusky being the real criminal
I think the final, final straw was after the news broke – Joe announcing that he would coach out the season and then retire. I suppose most on the board would have been OK with that result, but the procedure by which he stated it had to rankle them considerably. He should have asked them for permission to do so, for the players’ benefit – rather than declaring it in an act that was at best foolish and at worst insubordinate. They had to can him at that point or else the football tail would have wagged the university dog just at the time when the University had to insist that football is not bigger than the educational mission. As a football fan, it made be sad and I didn’t want it to end that way. But the Univeristy’s name (and not JoePa nor the football team’s names) is on my diploma – and as someone who loves the school and wants the school protected, it had to be done and I am glad they did what they did… though they could have fired him in the morning in person. The logistics of it all (crowds in town, at Joe’s house, and at the NLI precluded firing that evening and in a proper fashion).
This is exactly right.
I’ve argued it 100 times. At that moment, he had no business telling the university “don’t worry about me, it’s cool, I’m retiring after the season anyway”. It was an uncharacteristically clumsy attempt at a power play, and it failed. You’re correct, at that particular moment, Penn State couldn’t afford to show the country that the tail was wagging the dog.
Paterno has been over-vilified in this situation due to his fame and prior reputation, but he wasn’t without fault and needed to be removed. I wish he would’ve resigned voluntarily. So it goes.
by Chris Grovich on Jan 27, 2012 10:42 AM EST up reply actions
"clumsy attempt at a power play and it failed"
Yup – that just about says it all.
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