The child abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University apparently arose, in part, because of the university’s long and overweening desire to safeguard its reputation, and especially its football program, from controversy. There was a cold, if brutal, logic to that policy: Penn State’s academic success and consequent growth was tightly intertwined with the high reputation of its hugely successful football program.
Penn State football not only raises tens of millions of dollars annually for the university. It has also assured the university of a large and loyal following and produced a constant chain of admiring students, athletes and top-ranked recruits. Thus the university’s top officials reportedly became accustomed to suppressing or hiding potential controversies to keep the school’s image untarnished. An in-depth report by The New York Times this week recounted a variety of incidents that involved such suppression and court settlements that have been kept secret because Pennsylvania’s public colleges have been wrongly exempted from the state’s open records laws.
Settlement of a lawsuit against a star women’s basketball coach who was accused of discrimination against lesbians, for example, was kept secret. The university’s just-ousted president, Graham Spannier, fought for five years to keep the state’s capital-city newspaper from reporting the salaries of the Penn State’s highest officials. Then he personally lobbied the state legislature — successfully — to keep the college’s exemption from public records laws intact. The school also wrongly prohibited students from various political activities and protests.
And now, of course, at least two of its top officials have been charged with perjury regarding their grand jury testimony about what they knew, and apparently failed to report to police, about the alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy in the shower of a Penn State football locker room in 2002. In the scandal that has erupted, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky has been charged with 40 counts of sexual molestation against eight boys over a long period of years, and long-time coach Joe Paterno has been fired.
If the university is to begin to own up to its administrative responsibility for the scandal, it will have to change its institutional culture. To guarantee that happens, one focus of the four separate investigations that have now been initiated in the wake of the scandal should be to ensure a much higher level of transparency and crime reporting, even if that takes overturning state laws and rules that have helped the university thwart demands for greater transparency.
The investigations now underway have been started by the state attorney general’s office, the federal Department of Education and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The fourth independent investigation, announced Monday by the university’s board of trustees, will be headed by former FBI director Louis J. Freeh. Each of these probes have a role to play in ensuring that the university is no longer able to benefit from inadequate reporting rules and a lack of transparency.
The state attorney general’s investigation obviously will be focused on any instances of criminal conduct in withholding or illegally failing to report information that might have led to a criminal prosecution. The Department of Education probe must determine whether Penn State failed to meet federal Clery Act mandates, which require colleges, in return for federal funds, to report crimes on campus and to make crime data and reports on crime available to the public. The NCAA should also use the probe to require tougher rules for ethical compliance and crime reporting standards.
Freeh’s report to the board should identify the board’s and university’s apparent neglect of any and all such reporting standards, and compel the board to adopt stricter compliance and transparency standards, as well. Penn State is not the first university to look away from crime investigations to avoid negative publicity. But given the chilling record of child sexual abuse it likely enabled, it can’t recover its honor without becoming a true exemplar of the highest standards.