Having given its legendary football and coach and long-serving president the heave-ho in the wake of a child sex abuse scandal that overnight turned Happy Valley into a very unhappy place, should the Penn State board of trustees have cancelled tomorrow’s game against Nebraska? And were their decisive actions of Wednesday evening enough?
In my view they were enough for the short term. Cancelling the game would unfairly punish a team that had nothing to do with the scandal and merely make it yet another victim.
The long term is another matter.
New university President Rodney Erickson, the school’s 34-year-old provost, has vowed to move Penn State forward and away from the scandal, while the trustees have appointed a special investigating committee headed by a trustee and the state education secretary to try to learn what school officials did wrong.
That, on its face, is a great deal because it is likely that dozens of people knew about the depravities of defense coordinator Jerry Sandusky but were morally derelict in not reporting them
Other heads should roll, including the athletic director and the vice president who oversees the university police, both of whom have been charged for perjuring themselves before the grand jury investigating the allegations, and a now full-fledged assistant coach whose as a graduate assistant saw Sandusky anally rape a boy in the team’s locker room showers and reported the incident to Paterno, who merely directed him to the athletic director.
As it is, that coach, Mike McQueary, will not be on the sidelines tomorrow because he has received death threats and later was placed on leave.
And anyone fired or forced to resign, including Paterno and former president Graham Spanier, should be stripped of accrued benefits.
In other developments:
* The mother of one of Sandusky’s alleged victims told Good Morning America today that her son felt powerless to resist Paterno’s defensive coordinator, who showered him with gifts even as he abused him.
* In yet another black eye for the university, about 2,000 students rioted after Paterno’s firing was announced and some had to be repelled by police with pepper spray. Many students have now pledged to channel the emotion of the week into a more constructive cause, plan to hold a candlelight vigil tonight and solicit donations for child abuse prevention.
* Paterno, who tried to resign on his own terms at the end of the season, has been keeping his own counsel since releasing a petulant statement on Wednesday night. That is a good thing because he seems not to realize the gravity of a scandal that is substantially a result of his inaction.
Finally, props to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbitt, who as attorney general in 2009 convened an investigation into the allegations and then the grand jury that indicted Sandusky. It appears that Corbitt believed that university officials were moving too slowly to act on the grand jury’s report and pressured the board to act quickly.