“It wasn’t just university leadership that enabled Jerry Sandusky. It was a system that discourages making waves at all costs—and it infects every corner of America.” – Paul Campos, “Penn State Values: The System That Discourages Making Waves,” – The Daily Beast
“The moral of the Jerry Sandusky saga is this: Pennsylvania State University, as an institution, decided that protecting Joe Paterno’s reputation and winning a few more football games was more important than stopping the ongoing rape of young boys.”
“Of course, no one ever said anything like that out loud. Indeed, it’s likely that none of the many people who knew or suspected that Sandusky was a child molester ever made a conscious calculation that protecting the football program was more important than protecting the boys Sandusky was raping.
“Such a level of conscious sociopathic indifference to suffering is fairly rare. What isn’t rare are all the psychological, social, and legal mechanisms that allow someone like Sandusky to flourish in the midst of Our Great Little Town. For at least a decade, and probably far longer, State College was full of people who deliberately closed their eyes to the truth about Sandusky.
“These people didn’t know the truth only because they didn’t want to know it. The best example of this pattern of denial is provided by how Mike McQueary’s witnessing Sandusky’s anal rape of a 10-year-old boy in a shower was, within 24 hours, transformed into ‘something of a sexual nature’ when reported by Joe Paterno to his formal administrative superiors and then within a few days into what university president Gordon [sic] (the former president is Graham Spanier) Spanier characterized as ‘conduct that made someone uncomfortable.’
“Everyone knew, but everyone decided not to know—starting with Paterno, who, despite his canny attempts to play the role of the naive and befuddled old man, forced Sandusky off his staff all the way back in 1999, shortly after the first formal criminal complaint (that we know of) against Sandusky was filed with the police—a complaint that resulted in a 95-page police report, but, mysteriously, no charges.
“Sandusky’s coaching career was over, but neither Paterno nor anyone else decided to do anything about the fact that Sandusky would spend another decade using the university’s facilities to run his Second Mile charity for troubled young boys—not even after McQueary caught Sandusky raping a child on campus.
“Instead, the powers that were—including Paterno, Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, and vice president for business and finance Gary Schultz, who we now know kept a thick file on Sandusky—decided that, as president Spanier put it in a deleted email that he sued to get back, the ‘humane’ thing would be to cover up Sandusky’s ongoing career of serial child rape.
“Again, it’s unlikely any of these people ever thought of what they were doing in those terms, i.e., in terms of what they were actually doing, as opposed to what they told themselves they were doing. The human capacity for conscious and unconscious rationalization in the pursuit of craven self-interest is nearly unlimited, especially when those rationalizations are put forth in an institutional context, with all the pressure such contexts put on people to be ‘team players’ and ‘constructive contributors’ to the ongoing mission of those institutions.
“The single most chilling sentence in the legal record of the case is this: referring to the rape of the child witnessed by McQueary, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office noted in its report last November that ‘there is no indication that anyone from the university ever attempted to learn the identity of the child who was sexually assaulted on their campus or made any follow-up effort to obtain more information.’ Relatively few people are prone to the sorts of compulsions that can lead a man to the place where Jerry Sandusky finds himself today. Far more of us will, sooner or later, find ourselves at risk of committing the sorts of acts depicted in that quote.” Click here to read this Daily Beast article in its entirety.
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Sandusky’s raping of kids was known for far, far too long by Penn State, the trsetues, Joe Paterno basically everybody except the people that should have known. That would be the police, the parents, DCFS, the state’s attorney and others, and not just the presumed dead district attorney who’s car, computer [with the hard drive deleted & wiped clean], etc., all found except the district attorney. I think many people truly believe, especially me, that Penn State is complicit to recruiting an assassin to make this DA disappear because he was about to mar their horseshit image, and then hiring someone to kill him, and this continues again and again until the leads are finally gone about who knew what, when, where, how and why. I believe that not only does this have to become a federal investigation immediately, since the entire chain of school, city and state command is dirty including the former Pennsylvania Attorney General which now holds the title of Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett. Corbett knew more than what he alluded on NBC’s Sunday Meet the Press. Corbett’s hands are super dirty with the blood of innocent children. That is why President Obama has Ernie Duncan from the Dept. of Education investigating everyone. And if Duncan starts hitting pay dirt with all these creeps involved (those that covered it up are just as guilty as Sandusky and it’s as if they committed the act themselves because they are spineless turds) the Duncan will contact United States Attorney General, Eric Holder or the FBI to investigate every one of these turds especially from Paterno all the way to the state’s prior Attorney General Corbett. I hope they (the federal sector), will have enough balls to at least force them to take Paterno’s statue done at once, because every second it stands is an insult to all suvivors of sexual abuse, rape and torture. I will never watch another college football game without thinking of the children that were hurt at or by Penn State officials and all the criminal cover-up that ensued. Hang your heads in shame Penn State you will never be a trustworthy institution for a long, long time. My undying support goes out to all the survivors of rape, especially those that were at the hands of the criminal pederast Sandusky, Paterno and the supporting alumni of Jo Pa including all those involved covering up every piece of evidence.