As Mark points out, Gary Alan Fine finds the erasure of Paterno’s sporting accomplishments Orwellian, but such a practice is not just the stuff of dystopian fiction. At Reflection and Choice, Steven L. Jones writes:
Question: What do Joe Paterno and the Roman Emperor Nero have in common? Answer: damnatio memoriae
Damnatio Memoriae (Latin for “the condemnation of memory”) is the act of trying to erase a person from history. In the Roman world, this meant erasing the condemned man’s name from inscriptions, removing coins with his image from circulation, or defacing images and statues of him.
As you might imagine such an endeavor is extremely difficult to accomplish. Even in an age less bombarded by media than ours, it could be difficult to track down and remove every single mention of a person. People who generate great anger are normally people who have also left a lasting and far-reaching mark.
July 25th, 2012 | 5:01 pm
What is all this sympathy on First Things for Joe Paterno? I really don’t know enough about the NCAA, college football, and Penn State to know if the NCAA punishments were too lenient, too harsh, or whether the NCAA had no business intervening at all. But I think it was perfectly appropriate to remove Paterno’s statue.
July 25th, 2012 | 5:18 pm
Um, David, where do you see sympathy expressed in the above post? It’s simply pointing to an historical parallel.
July 25th, 2012 | 5:24 pm
I don’t care about Paterno. But I do feel for the students who actually did the winning, in those victories that were wiped out. I wonder if stripping the victories is too cruel for them.
Is “damnatio memoriae” appropriate? I don’t know that it’s any more “evil” than people who murder just to become famous. It seems unjust that Hitler is one of the most famous names ever.
Of course, Paterno’s memory won’t really be wiped out – no regulatory agency has that power, and it’s very possible that once the point is made, those wins will someday be restored. I think the whole thing is a reaction against Penn State’s dogged refusal to accept an appropriate level of responsibility. They kept making excuses when apologizing would be more appropriate. I think overall the penalties were too harsh – but I also think that the reason they were harsh was to make a point; some people are recognizing that ethics scandals and cover-ups are actually becoming serious enough to threaten the entire sport (and maybe sports in general), and those who do recognize the seriousness of this threat want to penetrate the denial of those who do not.
And is it really a case of damnatio memoriae? Revoking a victory is a typical response to ethics scandals. To me, the crucial point is that nobody, as far as I know, is trying to actually alter memories. If they were (are), it would be Orwellian. People are not supposed to forget Joe Paterno – I think the *point* is that we are supposed to remember him.
Only we’re supposed to stop saying “yes, but – his victories! – not fair to taint his name because – victories!” when they remember him.
July 25th, 2012 | 6:36 pm
Micah Mattix,
I read Steven L. Jones’s piece to imply that we’re just going to far in the case of Joe Paterno. Can’t we just remember him for what he did, both good and bad? It’s a sympathetic piece, and would probably not be out of place if we really were trying to erase Joe Paterno from history. But that is really not what is happening. Is it really wrong of Nike to rename the Joe Paterno Child Development Center? Nobody is going to forget Joe Paterno.
July 25th, 2012 | 6:55 pm
David,
You’re free to comment on Reflection and Choice. I offered the link sans commentaire.
That said, I think it’s possible to simultaneously express concern that we are going to far in Paterno’s case and have no sympathy for late coach (if it’s even possible to sympathize with a dead man).
You ask: “Can’t we just remember him for what he did, both good and bad?” That seems to be exactly Jones’s point.
July 25th, 2012 | 8:46 pm
The Christians among us here, myself included, remember well Romans 3:23. Memento Mori.
July 25th, 2012 | 9:11 pm
Yes, good reminder, Mike.
July 25th, 2012 | 11:19 pm
Shouldn’t leaders be judged by how they performed when placed under difficult circumstances? How does Paterno not completely fail that test?
Also, isn’t it a bit ironic to be using the term “Orwellian” in reference to a (until-recently) living person who had a bronze statue of himself installed in a public place? The problems of Joe Paterno were the problems usually associated with someone who is given unquestioned deference and cult-like reverence.
There is a lesson here but seem people seem to be missing it entirely.
July 26th, 2012 | 12:53 am
Mr. Nickol: Has the NCAA taken away O.J. Simpson’s Heisman Trophy? Has the Pro Football Hall of Fame taken down O.J.’s plaque?
No- because, in his day, he was the best football player in the world, and he BELONGS in the Hall of Fame.
It just so happens that he ALSO belongs in prison. There’s absolutely no contradiction there.
I have no strong objection to taking down Paterno’s statue, though my hunch is, it was largely taken down for financial reasons (the statue’s continued presence would be poiunted out repeatedly by plaintiffs’ lawyers during the inevitable civil trials).
However, I would have left the statue up. Paterno was the winningest college football coach of all time. He DESERVES that statue.
And if some people spit on the ground and snarl “Rot in Hell, Joe” as they pass the statue? Sadly, Joe deserves THAT, too.
July 26th, 2012 | 3:28 am
It’s ironic that neither linked article on Paterno and the revision of history bothers to directly mention the situation’s ultimate cause — S*nd*sky. These calls to respect memory are in part examples of its erasure.
A damnatio memoriae describes measures to erase the memory of someone deemed an “enemy of the state” by the Roman Senate. George Orwell’s 1984 imagines some future all-powerful state of Oceania, wherein history can be revised in toto at the whim of the ruling party. However, despite what probably aren’t the aspirations of some friendly folks in Pennsylvania, any comparison between the Imperial Roman State and Big Brother’s Oceania and PSU’s Commonwealth System of Higher Education (or the NCAA) is absurd. Aside from the obvious differences, the NCAA and PSU are also quite limited as to what they can “erase.”
As for questions of memory and forgiveness, the issues involved in the “Paterno Frage” are a far cry from, say, the Bitburg controversy of the mid-80s or the questions which arose when Lenin’s and Stalin’s statues came tumbling down in the early 90s. When the comparative absurdities have flown, and we’re looking at not JoePa but someone like Uncle Joe, what are we to make of the request that we remember the good with the bad?
July 26th, 2012 | 3:43 am
What do Paterno and Nero have in common? Both fiddled while Rome burned. As they committed the same crime, they both deserve the same punishment.
July 26th, 2012 | 6:42 am
The Christians among us here, myself included, remember well Romans 3:23. Memento Mori.
Mike Melendez,
I believe there is a Christian woman at my place of employment, and if she will decipher for me this strange code in which your people speak, I will have a comment.:P
July 26th, 2012 | 7:34 am
Mr. Nickol: Has the NCAA taken away O.J. Simpson’s Heisman Trophy? Has the Pro Football Hall of Fame taken down O.J.’s plaque?
astorian,
There is a significant distinction between Simpson’s misdeeds and Paterno’s. Simpson’s were committed many years after he retired from football. Paterno’s were committed on the job. Simpson, in his football-playing years did everything he was reasonably expected to do as a football player. Paterno, in his coaching years, failed to live up to his responsibilities as a coach.
July 26th, 2012 | 9:05 am
One good that could come out of this extended tragedy is that Penn State’s example might discourage other colleges from putting quite so many of their eggs in the basket of athletics.
July 26th, 2012 | 9:30 am
David,
I’m surprised your early Catholic education did not extend to the Bible and you do not recognize Latin when it is written. Google has an excellent translator, though this phrase is so well known you don’t need to use “translate:”. Please tell us how your Christian friend interprets my Romans reference. In the meantime, I’ll give my short interpretation. I call it the first rule of religion: “I am not God.”
Ray,
I wish I could agree with you but it’s not that colleges put too many eggs into the athletics basket, but that they get too many eggs out of it.
July 26th, 2012 | 9:51 am
Romans 3:23:
For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
July 26th, 2012 | 10:20 am
“What do Paterno and Nero have in common? Both fiddled while Rome burned. As they committed the same crime, they both deserve the same punishment.”
And it is a form of punishment that does more harm to the culture than good to the cause of justice. I cannot find any way in which pretending that history didn’t happen, or happened differently than it did, promotes justice or healing.
Yes, they get the same treatment. It doesn’t follow that it is a wise way to treat the offense.
July 26th, 2012 | 10:53 am
[...] HT: Micah Mattix [...]
July 26th, 2012 | 11:30 am
I cannot find any way in which pretending that history didn’t happen, or happened differently than it did, promotes justice or healing.
pentamom,
I cannot find any way in which the reaction to the Penn State scandal or the NCAA sanctions results in “pretending that history didn’t happen.”
July 26th, 2012 | 12:17 pm
David DePerro wrote:
“What do Paterno and Nero have in common? Both fiddled while Rome burned. As they committed the same crime, they both deserve the same punishment.”
As far as I know, fiddlin’ is not a crime. It’s also obvious that there’s one very big difference (among many others) between Nero and Paterno: Nero was punished for his own crimes, while Paterno is ultimately being punished for his indifference to the terrible crimes of another — Sandusky.
Then again, I guess you could pose the question as to which was worse: Sandusky’s crimes — the repeated sexual assault of children over many years — or those of his superiors (Paterno, Schultz, Spanier) who for several years failed to “do the right thing” and involve the (non-University) police.
Proverbs 8:13 and 16:18 seem more appropriate to Paterno’s case than Melendez’s decontextualized use of Romans 3:23.
July 26th, 2012 | 12:31 pm
David,
To pentamom’s point: the vacating of the victories of Penn State (for awful crimes and the covering up thereof, to be sure) by the NCAA seems indeed to have been motivated primarily out of the spirit of damnatio memoriae to which Micah Mattix refers. It’s sole purpose seems to have been to remove the shame and embarrassment associated with having Paterno’s name at the top of the list of “all time winningest football coaches in Division I”…..
As supporting evidence, one notes that the “vacating of victories” is almost always done by the NCAA in response to violations of the NCAA rules for the sport concerned. The Penn State scandal was only ancillary to the sport of football and the idea that somehow what happened there somehow gave Penn State a competitive advantage (which is what the NCAA is primarily concerned with) is looney tunes. It doesn’t really add up.
I understand why the NCAA did what it did, and am sympathetic to the motives. But as others have pointed out, there is really no much in the way of “justice” or “recompense” to much of what has been done by the NCAA. The principals involved in the crimes and the apparent cover up, are not materially punished by this and the victims receive no material benefit either. Thus the vacating of victories in particular smacks of both retribution and an attempt to re-write history.
July 26th, 2012 | 1:04 pm
I wonder if there will always be an “asterisk” after any mention of the new all-time winningest team and coach. The asterisk might be real or just notional, but I suspect most football fans will remember the footnote. It will probably become a trivia question, and make occasional appearances on Jeopardy if that is still on the air 20 years or so hence. It’s a strange pretense—something that is and isn’t.
July 26th, 2012 | 1:09 pm
Benighted,
I believe those apply as well but do not explain why some of us here show a little humility, especially after the fact. What would I have done in Paterno’s situation without the hindsight? What have I done, that, in some small way, had a similar impact on the innocent. Crime must be answered, but the work is never done, starting with ourselves.
July 26th, 2012 | 1:24 pm
david c –
A minor point of disagreement: Penn State’s funding and academics will suffer terribly from this blow to their athletic department, impacting the very things those officials were trying to protect. In that sense, it may offer some discouragement to others from going down any similar road. They’d have to be awfully sad human beings to be influenced like that, but clearly awfully sad human beings can in fact become officials at major universities.
But the collateral damage is so incredibly high!
What I would hope instead is for the people who participated in the cover-up to be prosecuted and (assuming the evidence really is as damning as has been portrayed) convicted. I can imagine no mitigating circumstances that would justify any but the maximum sentences. I suspect a demonstrable risk of jail time would be a far more effective deterrent.
July 26th, 2012 | 1:38 pm
What would I have done in Paterno’s situation without the hindsight? What have I done, that, in some small way, had a similar impact on the innocent. Crime must be answered, but the work is never done, starting with ourselves.
Mike Melendez,
I have no problem with this as long as it applies equally to Jerry Sandusky, Margaret Sanger, Joseph Stalin, and anyone else who has ever done anything people would condemn them for. But in judging the rightness or wrongness of Paterno’s behavior, we have to judge by what he should have done and what we should have done in his position, not by what we might have done because of our human weakness.
July 26th, 2012 | 2:02 pm
seems indeed to have been motivated primarily out of the spirit of damnatio memoriae to which Micah Mattix refers.
david c.,
Accuse me of being too literal minded, if you like, and I might plead guilty. But as we are told, “damnatio memoriae . . . is the act of trying to erase a person from history.” Joe Paterno’s record from 1966 through 1997 will still stand in the record books exactly as it occurred. Vacating victories from 1998-2011 was not an attempt to obliterate him from memory. He was knocked down from number 1 to number 12.
I actually have no idea whether what the NCAA did was right or wrong, too harsh or too lenient. And it looks like a lot of people will pay a very big price who had no part in the misdeeds. It also seems clear that the NCAA is making the playing field unlevel, assuring that Penn State will be at a disadvantage competitively. And this seems to be a deliberate goal, not merely a foreseen but not willed consequence of the punishment. I normally have a pretty firm opinion of just about everything, but this is one of those rare cases where I just don’t have a clue what the NCAA should have done, if anything.
July 26th, 2012 | 2:08 pm
Mike Melendez,
I hope most of us realize that “pride goeth before destruction” applies as easily to oneself as it does to others. I certainly do! However, in this public forum I’m more intetested in discussing the more general issues at hand — what is a crime? what is an appropriate punishment? how are both connected to history and memory? — than in ending the discussion by making the true observation that “there but for the Grace of God, go I.”
Or are we to quickly pass over such issues in silence?
July 26th, 2012 | 2:22 pm
Ray,
Agreed. It is clear that the NCAA intended this as a shot across the bow — a stark warning to other institutions not to try and cover up scandal. In that context the fines, the removal of scholarships, the probationary period and the bowl ban (though somewhat misdirected in my view) all make some sort of sense.
The vacating of victories does not. It is a weird fiction that attempts to say “these games didn’t happen”. It reminds me of the amusing scene from one of the later Star Wars movie in which the Jedi Knight waves his hand at a soldier hunting fugitive droids and says “these are not the droids you’re looking for” (though they clearly are) and the soldier moves on.
Vacating victories is the NCAA’s attempt at performing the Jedi mind trick when it comes to Paterno …
July 26th, 2012 | 3:12 pm
It reminds me of the amusing scene from one of the later Star Wars movie . . .
What it reminds me of is the scene in Sleeper, where Woody Allen, who has been frozen and awakened in the future, is shown a series of pictures of people from his/our present, and asked to provide historical information about them. Almost everything he says is wrong. When they show him a picture of Richard Nixon, they say they have no information on him whatsoever, and their theory is that he did something so wrong, an attempt has been made to eliminate all traces of him from history. Allen unhesitatingly confirms that as correct, and remarks that whenever Nixon left the White House, the White House staff counted the silverware. What is funny today is that the film was made before Watergate.
July 26th, 2012 | 8:33 pm
“I cannot find any way in which the reaction to the Penn State scandal or the NCAA sanctions results in “pretending that history didn’t happen.”
Pretending that Joe Paterno was not the winningest coach in history is not “pretending that history didn’t happen?”
I am not defending Paterno, and I understand the impulse that say that those victories should somehow count for less because they were allegedly done at an intolerable cost to others. But the reality is that he was the winningest coach, and it is non-reality to change his record to say that he was not.
July 26th, 2012 | 11:49 pm
Seems similar to a forfeit, something that is well-established in sports. To the extent that one of the commenters pointed out that the scandal did not affect the competitiveness of the football team the way that having, say, an eighteen year old on a little league team would, maybe forfeiting isn’t appropriate. Except that Penn State was concerned about its football program and its reputation — in other words, it tried to maintain competitiveness by covering-up the molestation. So I think a forfeit is fair. It is definitely hard for the players, but team sports are team sports — and all the hard lessons that go with rising and falling together (taken to the extreme in this case).
July 27th, 2012 | 10:11 am
The problem here is that Joe Paterno is dead.
Therefore, we cannot put him on trial or subject him to civil suit.
So we have to make up posthumous punishments for him.
Since when is that actually considered a good thing to do, though? It DOES smack of, if not Orwellianism, something similar, if you do things that aren’t really ultimately related to justice just because it’s the only way left to punish a dead man.
Again, not defending Paterno. It’s just that there seems to be this impulse to DO SOMETHING when really, the matter was taken out of the hands of the NCAA, the federal government, and the state of Pennsylvania back in January. I guess if you can’t convict or sue a man, you have to make sure his reputation is tarnished, even if it takes “unwinning” games that really were won. Maybe they can invent other facts about his life, too, just to make sure. What is the concern here — that what is known doesn’t damage his reputation *enough*? Why wouldn’t it?
July 27th, 2012 | 10:34 am
But the reality is that he was the winningest coach, and it is non-reality to change his record to say that he was not.
pentamom,
Do you think that ten, or twenty, or a hundred years from now, if anybody is still interested, it won’t be known that Penn State, with Joe Paterno as coach, didn’t actually score the most points in all the games where the wins have been vacated? No facts are being erased from the record. Anyone who wants to argue that Paterno wasn’t the winningest coach in college football will be free to make the case. What you are saying, it seems to me, is that it isn’t fair. Paterno won those games fair and square, and he shouldn’t lose official credit for them no matter what else he did wrong. That’s a reasonable argument, especially since taking away the credit from Penn State means all the players who actually played the games and won them lose credit, too. But I really don’t agree with the damnatio memoriae argument. No facts are being erased. The only thing that is happening is that a different interpretation is being put on those facts.
July 27th, 2012 | 10:38 am
All this concern over Joe Paterno seems rather misguided to me since what the NCAA has done will have devastating effects on living, breathing people for years to come.
July 27th, 2012 | 12:48 pm
pentamom –
Actually, there are much earlier precedents. But yes, I can’t see how it’s a good idea either.
July 27th, 2012 | 4:10 pm
Okay, so maybe the vacating of wins is not damnatio memoriae per se. But, Michael and David, I think you are missing what “vacating wins” actually means. They count as ~neither~ wins nor losses. It is as though those games were never played and is treated as such in the record books. But only for Penn State and only since 1998. So, for instance, in 2006 Penn State defeated Florida State. It’s now no longer considered a win for PSU but still goes as a loss for FSU (and Coach Bowden the new “all time wins” leader).
So don’t call it the “condemnation of memory” call it “Orwellian” memory holing. Whatever you call it — it just doesn’t make any rational sense. It helps not one of the victims in any material way and only appears to “punish” a dead man and a bunch of players who had absolutely nothing to do with the scandal. Not one thing. And why only go back to 1998. Why not go all the way back to the bginning of the long period of time when the criminal pedophile Jerry Sandusky was an assistant coach under Paterno? He actually helped them win those games by all accounts.
Look, in the longer term I agree with David that this is way too much talk about Joe Paterno. I think it is wrong to say that it is governed by “concern” for the man, however. My concern is for the cause of truth. As I said I can see why the NCAA did much of what it did. But this act, alonmg with the removal of the statue of Paterno seem to be a kind of imposition of historical blinders that has the possibility of doing a long term disservice to the truth in my view.
At the risk of violating Godwin’s law, let me draw something of a parallel: Why are Dachau and Auschwitz still standing? Because in the estimation of those who let those terrible places stand, we should never, ever, forget what happened there. The impulse to plow them under and salt the ground must have been very strong, but the reality of the effects of time on memory stayed the hand. Now that the numbers of surviving victims of the Holocaust continues to dwindle (and will soon be all gone) those places remind us to ask “what happened here?” and it can be hoped, to respond “never again”.
Penn State was not on the same scale, but it was a horror in it’s own right. The record and the statue could have been used an instrument of truth telling, warning and even education. Here was a man who did great things for his team and his university, but in the end, he failed an essential test of leadership, and even human decency for reasons appear to have been venal and self-aggrandizing…. I think that’s powerful. I do not believe it’s the only way, but I think it is a way too easily pushed away by our culture…
July 27th, 2012 | 4:18 pm
So we have to make up posthumous punishments for him.
The perception is that the reason he didn’t fire the known child molester is that he cared more about his legacy than about his duty.
So taking his legacy away from him is, in this regard, an appropriate response.
The goal is to change the logic away from “we must overlook what is going on or else our reputations will be ruined” to “we must take correct action regarding what is going on or else our reputations will be ruined”.
July 27th, 2012 | 4:19 pm
But the reality is that he was the winningest coach, and it is non-reality to change his record to say that he was not.
Actually that is not the reality.
The reality is that he would have been the winningest coach, if he hadn’t had his victories tainted by his failure to maintain his locker room.
Which is not quite the same thing.
July 27th, 2012 | 10:42 pm
David Nickol writes:
“All this concern over Joe Paterno seems rather misguided to me since what the NCAA has done will have devastating effects on living, breathing people for years to come.”
It would be more precise, and more humane, to follow the lead of the NCAA (and PSU’s current leadership) and be primarily concerned with the devastating effects of what Jerry Sandusky, who was found guilty last month of 45 counts of sexual abuse, did to those boys while he was Paterno’s assistant coach. Speaking once again of memory, how about everyone remembering the living, breathing people that Sandusky sexually assaulted.
Since the NCAA is not a totalitarian or imperial state with police powers — not by any strectch the imagination, since it’s not even a state organization — comparisons with ancient Rome or Orwell’s novel seem to be made in the interest of obfuscation, not clarity. Pentamom’s claim that what has happened to Paterno “DOES smack of, if not Orwellianism, something similar” and David C’s observation that “maybe the vacating of wins is not damnatio memoriae per se” similarly do nothing to dispell the confusion and contradictions surrounding the claim that the NCAA’s sanctions, and PSU’s decision to remove Paterno’s statue, are unjust. They just add to the murk.
July 28th, 2012 | 8:17 am
I think there is something Nixonian in Paterno’s fate—sure, we remember Nixon in China, but mostly we associate him with the disgrace of Watergate. I suspect that Paterno’s legacy is permanently tainted.
In time (if not already), there will be plenty of people who will think it was Paterno who molested those children. No doubt some think Nixon broke in to the DNC, or at least that he was more directly involved in the break-in than he was. It was the cover up that really sank both men.
The Greeks wrote plays about such men.
July 28th, 2012 | 8:28 am
Savage,
Seriously? The vacating of the victories is going to help us focus on the victims? How so, pray tell? I completely agree that Sandusky’s crimes and his victims ought to be the focus of all of this. Which invites the question as to why the NCAA (the governing body for college sport) is even involved?
Even ceding that point (because the abuse occurred in the context of an athletics program and facility) one has to wonder how the victims are served (or Sandusky, Paterno, etc. are punished) by a 60 million dollar fine and the suspension of 25 scholarships per year? Or a ban against bowl appearances? Not a single one of these actions materially affects the perpetrators of the crimes and cover up. Not one.
Further, the actions of the NCAA have themselves created an enormous distraction from what we agree should be the central concern. Turn to any sports page or ESPN program and read or watch. The Association’s draconian response has led not to a discussion of child abuses and how it might be prevented, or to a focus on the victims and their stories, but instead on an almost exclusive focus on how all of this will effect football at Penn State. Thus the NCAA has, in my view, done a disservice to the victims and to the discussion of the central issue by making this awful scandal seem to be primarily about football. It wasn’t.
Your assertion that to call these actions Orwellian is wrong because the NCAA is not an imperial or totalitarian state is to misunderstand the analogy. We are talking about the attempt to erase history (throwing records down the “memory hole”) that is a prominent feature of the novel, not the NCAA as Oceania.
July 28th, 2012 | 11:05 am
David C,
There has been no attempt to “erase” history, by the ill-equipped NCAA or any other group. If anything, the history of Joe Paterno’s record, good and evil, has been highlighted these past months. My suggestion is to stop abusing absurd and inapt historical and literary analogies and see if you can articulate your apparent misgivings about the NCAA’s actions without them.
I see the severity of the NCAA’s sanctions as evidence of their attempt to give a death blow, at PSU and elsewhere, to the cover-up-permitting “culture of silence” and its source, what the NCAA/PSU consent decree calls the “culture of reverence” for football programs. If the sanctions are successful, I can’t imagine a more fitting memorial to Sandusky’s victims than that.
July 28th, 2012 | 2:55 pm
“So taking his legacy away from him is, in this regard, an appropriate response.”
But in an earthly justice sense, ther eis no “him” to take the legacy from.
If we had a time machine, and could go back and tell Joe Paterno ca. AD 2000 or 2011 what was going to happen and that he’d lose his legacy, then that Joe Paterno would experience punishment. But there’s no Joe Paterno to feel the effect of the “lost legacy,” so it just doesn’t accomplish anything.
July 28th, 2012 | 11:42 pm
“But there’s no Joe Paterno to feel the effect of the “lost legacy,” so it just doesn’t accomplish anything”.
True. Maybe he will serve as an object lesson for others, though.
July 29th, 2012 | 1:12 am
“So taking his legacy away from him is, in this regard, an appropriate response.”
But in an earthly justice sense, ther eis no “him” to take the legacy from.
But it will do a heck of a job scaring others like him out of the same logic, in the future.
I see the real problem as being the sports establishment itself needing to distance themselves and make clear that THEY are not part of the cultural disease that needs to be cut away.
I agree with those who said it would be better if the football program had been shut down (preferably voluntarily). But from a practical viewpoint, if they’d shut down the program, it might very well create a martyr situation – because there are actually two problems, not just one: there’s the problem of what happened, and there’s the second, related but separate problem of people who are defending and justifying Penn State. The existence of apologists and defenses creates a problem that has to be solved. They solved it.
(As I said before, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the vacated wins are later restored – but not until all traces of denial and justification are thoroughly stamped out, and all Penn State apologists understand that this is serious, and can’t be defended.
The existence of people complaining that Joe Paterno is the “real victim”, or defending Penn State, or complaining about penalties, makes the threat one that threatens the entire sports structure. Especially combined with other complaints and current events issues involving the so-called “higher ed bubble”, this controversy could incite a backlash that affects far more than just one local college football team.
July 30th, 2012 | 1:12 pm
Blake,
Once more with feeling. Criticizing the methods and the manner of the NCAA in the Penn State case does not amount to a “defense” or “justification” of the university or a complaint that Paterno is the “real victim”. That’s just a lazy way of trying to stifle dissent that will gain plenty of adherents because the crimes committed were so very awful and repellent.
If this were the Obama administration using say, the FDA, to shut down Chick-fil-a, you’d be all over it, reminding us that powers are limited, that government overreach shouldn’t be tolerated even if the cause is conceived as “just” etc.
What happened at Penn State was terrible. It should be addressed forcefully, carefully, at length and by ~the appropriate authorities~. The NCAA’s brief (as anonymous members of the Freeh Committee have reminded us this week) is to address violations of that organizations rules which affect team conduct and competitive balance in sport. It is quite a stretch to say that that is what occurred at Penn State.
I will leave what Savage considers all “abusive” analogies aside and state it as simply as I can. The NCAA completely overstepped its charter. It did so for reasons that can be understood, but in a manner which I (and a good many others who are not interested in “defending Paterno etc.”) believe was illegitimate to its stated aims. This was only about sport in an ancillary way. The NCAA’s involvement made it seem central. I believe that did a disservice to everyone involved.
What do I think should have been done? In terms of the criminal pedophile Sandusky and those involved in covering for him — prosecution to the full extent of the law and liability for as many civil penalties as the victims care to pursue and are able to prove. Broke and in jail for the whole cohort…
For Penn State University, the same. Any members of a criminal conspiracy punished, civil penalties levied. In academic terms — the institution should have to face an accreditation fight with whomever is responsible for such. It seems clear that the culture of football at PSU was allowed to distort the academic mission and values of the University. A probationary period of some number of years etc.
For Penn State football — if the problem was a cultural one — ie a ‘win at all costs’ mentality that was able to distort academic values solely at PSU, let the NCAA do what is clearly within its powers – issue the death penalty for a “lack of institutional control” at PSU and have done with the sport there for some number of years. If the intent really was to (as NCAA officials claimed) “change the culture of college football” then really do that. Take college football off television, eliminate scholarships, do away with bowl games and have a straightforward playoff system. Cap coaches salaries to that of top tenured professors. Eliminate corporate sponsorships and cap alumni giving to revenue the “revenue” sports, or decree a dollar for dollar division amongst all the particular schools NCAA governed programs…etc.
At the risk of inviting the wrath of Benighted Savage — one more analogy… The hoary old saying is that “when the only tool you have is a hammer — every problem looks like a nail”. The NCAA looked at the PSU scandal and saw a nail. They were wrong.
July 31st, 2012 | 8:45 am
Once more with feeling. Criticizing the methods and the manner of the NCAA in the Penn State case does not amount to a “defense” or “justification” of the university or a complaint that Paterno is the “real victim”.
No, and I’m sorry if I confused the two situations. I shouldn’t have.
But there are still people who are denying and minimizing. And that is a problem.
It’s an odd thing to me, to watch the fallout from the priest molestation scandals, and compare various aspects of those scandals against both the Penn State situation and also the teacher’s union debate going on (where some people are outraged that the union makes it too difficult to fire sexually inappropriate teachers). It seems to me that we are in the presence of a belief system that is still not consistent, the way mature belief systems are consistent. By this I mean: we all agree that slavery is wrong – that’s a mature belief system. And we all believe that the perpetrator in a sexual abuse case is wrong – mostly (Roman Polansky defense petitions being the glaring flaw in this assertion.) But we are not at all consistent about issues of liability when it comes to dealing with the secondary or peripheral issues surrounding molestation issues.
July 31st, 2012 | 8:47 am
The NCAA looked at the PSU scandal and saw a nail. They were wrong.
I think they should have shut down the program. But doing so would have created a martyr syndrome.
The best thing would have been if Penn State had voluntarily shut down the program for a specified period of time. The fact that they did not do so is IMO the interesting part of the problem.
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