At Penn State, a Bitter Reckoning (Bérubé Column, NY Times)

THE worst scandal in the history of college athletics, involving charges of serial child rape and systemic covering up, is almost too much to comprehend. The breaches of trust — on the part of a former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, toward vulnerable children, and on the part of Penn State administrators who responded to a credible report of child rape in 2002 merely by barring him from bringing young boys onto campus — reach far beyond the world of ordinary big-time college sports corruption.

The public image of Penn State is now that of students rioting on behalf of a disgraced football coach. But there are also 6,000 full-time teachers and researchers working here — and none of us had anything to do with this mess. Like the vast majority of our 45,000 students, we did not riot. We are every bit as disgusted and horrified as you are. This is our place that has been trashed, and we care deeply about cleaning it up.

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Mr. Paterno and three university presidents — Bryce Jordan, Joab L. Thomas and Graham B. Spanier — were determined to compete with their counterparts in the Big Ten off the field as well as on. The Paterno family endowed two professorships that testify to their commitment to the humanities; one is in the library. The other is in English. I’m well acquainted with that professorship, since I happen to hold it.

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Penn State has been an emphatically “top-down” university; decisions, even about academic programs, are made by the central administration, and faculty members are “consulted” afterward. Now Penn State will very likely lose its exemption from open records laws, and rightly so. But the administration must begin treating faculty members, and their elected representatives on the Faculty Senate, as equal partners in the institution. Perhaps if a faculty ethics committee had been informed about Mr. Sandusky in 2002, one of us could have advised administrators to inquire more aggressively into the case instead of circling the football program’s wagons.

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No comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/opinion/at-penn-state-a-bitter-reckoning.html

"Perhaps if..." is poor attempt at best.

Seems like a responsible way to address a hypothetical, and probably a bit of deliberate understatement anyway.

We've probably had too many "I woulda done X and i woulda done Y" on this topic already. :-)

It seems beside the point, in any case.

in this article.

The first is that there evidently is no faculty ethics committee at Penn State. Without a faculty ethics committee, how are allegations of faculty plagarism or deliberately fudged research adjudicated? There isn't even an ethics advisor on campus? Who would a faculty member consult about a possible conflict of interest in terms of research or scholarship?

The second is that somehow Penn State is evidently "exempt" from Pennsylvania's open records law. How is this justified?

Mechanisms such as a properly functioning ethics committee, sexual harassment policies, reporter mandates, open records laws, etc., aren't petty irritations imposed by PC purists. They're absolutely essential tools in trying to prevent just the sort of moral meltdown as has evidently happened at Penn State.

I wish professor Berube luck in getting his institution to make these changes.