After Sandusky: The lessons of Penn State

Jerry Sandusky’s reign of terror is finally over, said George Diaz in the Orlando Sentinel. Last week, the former Penn State assistant coach, 68, was convicted on 45 counts of sexually molesting 10 young boys in a charity he founded, and will very likely be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. But the jury’s quick and emphatic verdict left one major question unanswered: How could Penn State officials spend more than a decade ignoring “the most despicable crime in the history of college football”? There’s really no mystery, said Howard Bryant in ESPN.com. Allegations that Sandusky was molesting children go back to 1998, but weren’t reported to the police because they would have damaged the image of Penn State’s football program and its sainted coach, Joe Paterno, who died earlier this year. “No community likes to challenge its false notions of itself,” and in Paterno’s Happy Valley, no one wanted to admit they had a monster in their midst.

We now know just how much evidence Penn State chose to ignore, said David Haugh in the Chicago Tribune. For decades, there have been “whispers and raised eyebrows” about Sandusky, whose charity gave him unrestricted access to fatherless boys. In 2001, former assistant coach Mike McQueary caught Sandusky anally raping a child in the locker-room showers, and alerted Paterno that he’d seen something sexual. In emails that recently came to light, university officials told each other it would be “humane” not to turn Sandusky over to police. They probably couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that the nice guy they knew was a serial predator, said USA Today in an editorial. People assume that pedophiles are “skuzzy strangers in trench coats.” In reality, most of them are coaches, clergymen, teachers, and kindly uncles—people like Sandusky, who “cloak themselves in respectability.”

We can all take a lesson from Penn State’s denial, said Paul Campos in TheDailyBeast.com. Human beings have an enormous “capacity for conscious and unconscious rationalization” that enables us to turn a blind eye to things we don’t want to see—especially when they threaten something important to us. This doesn’t mean Paterno and other officials shouldn’t be held responsible for their failure to act. But when confronted with an awful truth that challenges our deepest assumptions and loyalties, we all turn into ostriches. “In that sense, all of us are, or can easily become, Penn State.”

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