Concerning the Intelligencer Journal New Era editorial “Onward State?” that asserts:
“The crimes against children that were committed by Jerry Sandusky were so egregiouis and so egregiously overlooked by peole who should have known better, that the NCAA decided to punish Penn State even though the reasons had nothing to do with competition on a football field.”
Hmm.
“Identification with an aggressor: In psychology, an unconscious process in which a person adopts the perspective or behavior patterns of a captor or abuser. Some researchers consider it a partial explanation of Stockholm syndrome.”
Let us set forth a strictly hypothetical situation: A teacher assistant at Franklin & Marshall is swimming at the field house and, upon returning to the men’s locker room, encounters a retired philosophy professor messing around, apparently inappropriately, with a boy.
He reports the matter to the head of the philosophy department in just about those words who in turn reports what appeared to be inappropriate contact between the retired professor and a boy to the administrator in charge of F & M’s security force.
The professor is told not to use the field house any longer and the matter is reported to a board member of an organization for the benefit of boys of which the retired professor had founded and continued to lead.
Now would the NCAA expunge the records of F & M’s football team, levy an $80 million penalty upon the school, and deprive football players of scholarships and the right to participate in post season bowls? Would it even take notice of the matter?
The above is basically what happened with the Jerry Sandusky / Penn State affair. In that case the witness just happened to an assistant football coach, he reported the incident using vague language to the head coach, the coach promptly reported it to the appropriate administrator.
Jerry Sandusky was in that gym not because he had been an assistant football coach but because he was a retired professor who was exercising the same privilege that every retired professor has to use the facility.
The issue was about the handling of what was reported as apparent inappropriate behavior by the university administration, not about football or athletics or players, any more than the hypothetical situation described above.
The NCAA had no jurisdiction by its own by-laws or constitution. Mike Bull, sports editor of the Intell perhaps instinctively recognized the injustice of the NCAA action. NewsLanc’s editor did also and, through reserach, found no basis for the NCAA’actions it its constitution or by-laws.
The editors of the Intell should stop making excuses for Tom Corbett’s lead role in the firing of Joe Paterno on the coach’s death bed and for the NCAA’s outrageous intervention in a non-sports related matter.
Let’s hope the current law suit against the NCAA goes to trial so that the public can learn all of the maneuvering that went on behind the scenes.
