Penn State students take to streets after Paterno, president lose jobs
By the CNN Wire Staff
Hundreds spilled into the streets at Penn State early Thursday morning following news that football head coach Joe Paterno and the school's president were ousted over a child sex abuse scandal at the university.
What started as an apparent celebration of Paterno turned raucous, as the crowd tipped over a news van and decried the media. The university said on its Facebook page that police issued a dispersal order for the Old Main and downtown areas, and "everyone must vacate both areas immediately."
By 2 a.m., the scene had largely cleared.
The disturbance came shortly after university trustees announced Wednesday night that Paterno, the winningest coach in major college football, and Penn State President Graham Spanier were out of their jobs, effective immediately.
Occupy Happy Valley. They are the 99% (the percentage of young men not molested by the coaching staff).
ReplyDeleteSo apparently young men at Penn State prefer pedophiles over losing at football.
ReplyDeleteWhat does this say about their own sexual preferences? Has Penn State secretly been the go-to place for pedophiles to get a quality education?
Fucking shameful.
While, of course, in the aftermath of any complex human event, there will be many and varied responses. Likewise, the source behaviors will be parsed ad infinitum.
ReplyDeleteStill, the following:
“Of course we’re going to riot,” said Paul Howard, 24, an aerospace engineering student, as he jeered the police. “What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?" (NY Times, 11/10/11)
... just sickens me.
Where is the outrage for the VICTIMS of this crime?
With all of the difficulties the nation faces, a riot is supposed to be an expected result to the firing of a person whose primary contribution is helping a group of young men win a sporting event? We are to ignore that he may/may not be culpable for abetting -- at least -- one crime?
Funny, how the ouster of three other Penn State officials -- including the president -- is barely worthy of mention.
Sorry, but I thought a primary goal of a flagship university was to teach students critical thinking and good citizenship.
It's not their brother or son being raped, after all, so what's the big deal?
ReplyDeleteThat said, I agree with Bubba, over on the other thread. If an allegation like this came to me, and I reported it to campus authorities for investigation, I'd assume that, if nothing came back down, it was unfounded. JoPa may be guilty of blindness, but it doesn't seem to me that it was willful blindness.
This is not at all on a par with the practice of transferring teachers who are known to molest their students to another school district so it can be someone else's problem. It's more like finding out that your sweet little grandmotherly neighbors, with whom you've been friends for years and for whom you have the highest regard, have a dozen hobos buried in their basement.
The students think that JoPa is being made a scapegoat. Maybe they're right. Or maybe the university board is; the command principle is that you are responsible for what your subordinates do, even if you were not present and did not know.
An interesting analysis - not to excuse, but to explain - showed up on The American Scene. It ties in with the last sentence of my previous comment.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we've seen more than the very bare bones beginnings of what is to come. One pedophile coach and a few kids? Maybe. I hope that's the extent of it, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear about more adults involved and more kids.
ReplyDeleteI like that discussion in "The American Scene"; I think it ties in with the parallels others have found to the Catholic Church. In the military, in the Church, and in (it now appears) the field of sports, it seems that the first impulse is to keep everything in-house and deal with it 'in private' - or not deal with it, as the case may be; even when not only the moral but the legal responsibility is to call the police.
ReplyDeleteI think if the coach had not known, he would not have been fired. But he did know, if only second-hand, and he didn't follow through. Perhaps he wasn't legally liable to follow through, but I gather he's presented the image of a moral arbiter for very many years, so not doing the moral thing, never mind the legal thing, shatters his image. Which makes him no longer useful to the university.
Firing the president, however, was the right thing to do. Even if he honestly was only told that the rapist was "horsing around" with a 10 year old naked and alone in the shower, that was enough to call the police. Just pulling the guy's keys did not fulfil even his minimum responsibility.