The Garden of Good and Evil

By now, we know what the acronym PC means. To start with, it’s the thing I’m typing this post on – but you know what I’m talking about: Political Correctness. Inoffensive ways of saying, doing, or demonstrating things. Disabilities being renamed “challenges,” you know the drill. But then there is the revision, or more precisely, the suppression, of history. Removing the statues of former heroes who turned out to be bad guys. The late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno is one of the best examples, for his perceived cover-up of child sex abuse. The number of winning football seasons, and the prestige and money he brought to the university, became secondary. As for the living, Bill Cosby is being stripped of an honorary degree because of the numerous drug-date-rapes he is accused of. The comedy albums that made millions laugh will stay in the back of the record cabinet (do you even have a “record cabinet”?).

This week, though, it hit closer to home for me. An organization of students wants Princeton University to make the name Woodrow Wilson go away. Wilson was the 28^th president of the United States, but before that, he was governor of New Jersey and the president of Princeton, where I went in the last century. But he was a racist. He supported segregation. His favorite movie was “Birth of a Nation.”  But President Wilson also supported women’s suffrage. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his sponsorship of the League of Nations, a precursor to the U.N. One of the most prestigious schools of international affairs at Princeton bears his name, so far, anyway. Oops, but then there’s the income tax.

OK, so what are we to conclude here? He wasn’t the greatest president we’ve ever had, but nor was he the worst. He was a human being, full of contradictions. Thomas Jefferson fathered children with a black slave. Andrew Jackson signed the legislation forcing Indian tribes off their land. But I'm not ready to teer up my $20 bills just yet.

I partly went along with the Confederate flag thing. I agree that it had no business being on state flag designs or on the flagpoles of state buildings. But is it only about slavery? Or is the symbolism a little broader than that in the South? Is it quite the same as the Nazi flag? I’m supposed to be sure about the answers – but sorry, I’m not.

The Civil War was an awful thing.  Hundreds of thousands of young men died. Yet, Fort Sumter in South Carolina, where the first shot was fired, is a national monument. A friend who visited there recently told us that the bricks at the fort were created by black slaves. Civil War battlefields are historic sites all over the East. Every year, many slightly overweight men try to squeeze into Union or Confederate uniforms for Civil War reenactments. Almost like it’s a great big game.

Human history is always about contradictions, because it’s all about us. Why can’t we get used to that, live with them, and more importantly, learn from them, instead of fussing quite so much over symbolism? A black-and-white world is a lot easier to understand and navigate. But it’s just not the world we live in.

Unnecessary Roughness

While the late Coach Joe Paterno and several top Penn State administrators appear to be responsible for covering up unspeakable crimes attributed to Jerry Sandusky, I wonder why the NCAA needs to revise history.

On top of huge financial penalties, the organization has stripped the school of its gridiron victories between 1998 and 2011, the years when Paterno and others, according to the Freeh report, agreed to hide Sandusky’s child sex abuse activities to protect the football program from bad publicity. Perhaps someone reading this may have seen one of those games. Did Penn State win, or not?

Typically, colleges are penalized for recruiting violations, unethical favors for star players, letting team members skate on grades, etc. I’m trying to figure out how Sandusky’s alleged offenses, horrible as they were, affected the performance of Penn State teams.

Maybe you could say that if the crimes had been exposed early on, the coaching system would have been disrupted, as Joe Paterno would have been forced to name a new assistant and the school’s ability to field top teams in the wake of the publicity might have been impacted. So, continuing with business as usual would constitute an unfair advantage. That argument may work for you; I’m not sure it does for me.

The school has also been banned from bowl games and will lose scholarships, as well as shared revenue from college football seasons. And current players will be able to take their scholarships to other schools. Observers say it will be the better part of a decade before the football program is back on its feet again. Many are saying, “Fine, football’s too important in what’s supposed to be an academic institution.” Explain that to current students, faculty, alumni, and also the business people in a college town who depend on seasonal income from fans. And, of course, there’s the question of where the money’s going to come from to pay off the lawsuits. How exactly is the school supposed to recover?

All those former Penn State administrators who participated in this scandal should be stripped of all their assets; others who turned their heads in denial of the facts shouold be identified; and whoever’s in charge of hell can turn up the furnace in the section where Joe Paterno may be, and where perhaps Jerry Sandusky may join him. But once the cancer's removed, isn’t it time to stop the radiation?

Fair Comepnsation at Penn State

Following the release of that scathing report about the Sandusky sex abuse cover-up at Penn State, CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin observed that “wheelbarrows” would be needed to transport all the money the university would have to pay out to the victims in view of the punishment that angry juries would likely inflict in the inevitable lawsuits.

But what of the “other” victims here -- the students, faculty, administrators and board members who were not involved, and even the local community the university supports? Who is going to compensate them?

Certainly, the minors who were directly abused by Sandusky are entitled to fair compensation for what’s been done to them. But how much of a blow can the university take, especially if its insurance coverage doesn’t apply? Will classes have to be cut, faculty and other workers laid off? How about the vaunted football program, which would seem to be an especially juicy target?

Just to start with that, there are students whose opportunity for a college education depends on their ability to play football, and many have gone on to be productive members of society. Is that program now worthless?

It would clearly be appropriate to remove Joe Paterno’s statue from the campus, or at least cover it with a tarp for a long time. But Paterno and the other villains in this scandal are gone now – in his case, really gone. What more can the school realistically do?

When it comes to damages, it could be argued that no amount of money can fairly compensate Sandusky’s victims, meaning that huge awards to these folks would, in the great scheme of things, serve primarily as a symbol of the terrible things that have happened to them and a warning that such offenses will be have dire consequences in the future. When it comes to the money, though, I hope that a sense of balance prevails among the attorneys seeking compensation for their clients (and themselves) and among the civil juries deliberating cases that go beyond the settlement phase. There are others who will be suffering losses for which they have no remedy.

Bad Endings

By now, you’ve had more than an earful about the “Wednesday night massacre” at Penn State, and the firing of legendary football coach Joe Paterno. The university’s board of trustees is receiving praise in many circles for the courage it showed in making these decisions, especially about Mr. Paterno.

In a discussion last night, I said that while I didn’t necessarily disagree with the decision to fire him, I was still having a hard time with it. Many aren’t. It was simply a question of a powerful individual failing to use that power in a way that could have avoided a terrible injustice, in this case, to children and their families. End of story, right?

I guess what I’m having a hard time with is this: here’s a man who was still coaching college football at the age of 84 and was called the winningest coach. His career spanned more than 45 years. How many young men’s lives has he helped shape over that period? How much honor – and money – has flowed to that university because of him, enhancing the quality of education at that school for many other students? And poof! – it’s all gone after a little TV coverage. In other news...

If the tragedy involved in Paterno’s situation here hasn’t registered with you, I hope you take a minute to think about it. The easy answer is, what about the children that could have been protected if he had taken more forceful action? Isn’t that more important than college football?

Don’t worry, Joe Paterno will get what many think he deserves, and more. He will likely spend a good portion of the rest of his life as a civil defendant. If it’s shown that he violated the law or participated in an actual cover-up, he should be a criminal defendant.

But as we prepare to flush someone’s life work down the toilet, I hope we take just a little time – at least in our own minds -- before we reach for the handle on the tank.