You might have heard about the child abuse allegations swirling around the football coaching staff of Penn State. As someone who is from Pennsylvania, lives in Pennsylvania, and has hoards of friends and acquaintances who positively glow when they talk about Penn State…not to mention a client who has a life size cardboard cutout of Joe Paterno standing in his office, I have been thinking about this quite a bit as I follow the ongoing revelations.
As I’ve learned how long this has been going on and how many people are implicated in the coverup, I’ve become more and more depressed about what it says about the Penn State culture of protecting football at all costs…even at the cost of allowing an accused pedofile to continue onward and potentially find new victims.
I feel sadness that a great university could have so lost it’s way as a beacon of teaching right from wrong…have forgotten that part of education is creating future citizens with outstanding values that we expect our country to exemplify.
But mostly I feel great anger that those in authority had absolutely no compassion or concern for those molested, both past and future. They were as the flotsam and jetsam swirling around the ship, beneath thought.
I had decided not to write anything about it for what could I add and what would it bring to a blog mostly talking about leadership and management? Then I happened to read the November 23 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Frank Fitzpatrick, “Did PSU players get special treatment?”
It is a straightforward recitation of various meetings related to the football team that went on since 2002 when team member Anwar Phillips was accused of sexually assaulting a female student. It paints a picture of a culture perverted to at all cost protect football or maybe the money brought in by football.
And it shows what happens when an entire organization has so lost its way and thinks itself above all rules and regulations, and the law.
The title of this post, it’s part of a quote from Graham Spanier, university president at the time, talking to Vicky Triponey who at the time was a Vice President and headed the university disciplinary arm, judicial affairs. The entire quote is “Vicky, the coach is right. We can’t expect the players to tell the truth.”
The coach mentioned is Paterno.
Think about the revered football coach and the president of the university agreeing that it was too much to expect football players to tell the truth.
As you all know so well, culture starts at the top.
Who knows where this will end. All because those at the top lost their way.
The motto of Penn State athletics?
Success with Honor