This is a comment by MCA on the post “Sandusky Victims: Tear down the Paterno Statue Yourselves“.
“The statue isn’t the problem. The problem is what erected it and what it represents—the excessive fetishization of sports, to the point that protecting the brand/team (and its revenue) took precedence over protecting children from a monster.
“Firing Joe Paterno won’t solve that problem. Shutting down the entire Penn State football program permanently won’t solve that problem; it’ll just happen again in another football school, if it isn’t happening right now. The solution is to end college sports, all of them. We’re the only civilized nation whose public universities function primarily as sports clubs, with education a distant second, and we certainly piss away far money money on them that anyone else. As long as those warped priorities remain in place, the ingredients for a repeat of this scandal remain as potent as ever. Every few months, like clockwork, there’s a new scandal. How long will it take before people finally realize that it’s not “bad actors”, it’s a toxic environment that will turn anyone bad.
“Of course, this entirely skips over the broader social obsession with grown men whose sole accomplishment is playing children’s games. That the people working to cure cancer have to fight tooth and nail over every scrap of funding just to keep the lights on while we pay people billions for contributing absolutely nothing to society says horrible things about our priorities as a society.”
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First of all I say all this as someone who generally despises the idea of big-time college sports, especially football. I don’t think our colleges and universities should have expensive sports programs, period, so part of me would love it if Penn State lost its football program even for a few years. Maybe they’d get used to it and never look back, like what the University of Chicago did decades ago. Part of me welcomes any excuse to divest colleges of their athletic departments. However, it’s overkill to destroy an entire program because of the actions of its individual members,… Read more »
We did close Abu Ghraib and summarily prosecute all involved including those way up the ladder, whom never held a leash in their hand. Buhbah C’s perjury was not a system-wide wrong. It was an individual. Our nation divided and fought over clashing ideologies regarding slavery and trade. Eventually, we punished the crap out of the south in a post-war recovery. We (VERY) wrongly imprisoned an entire ethnic category of Americans over a feared allegiance. The DOJ summarily executed men, women and children whom had nothing to do with anything at Waco. American and Americans today are ghastly afraid of… Read more »
I still wonder at the Glass Ceiling that exists when it comes to culpability in Institutional failure. I have to agree that The Fetishization of College Sports has been a massive enabler in the Sandusky – PSU – Paterno scandal. Organisational Culture and Myopia are central and key issues here. I have seen that culture and myopia play out many times on varying levels. I’ve seen people die because of it – I’ve seen people kept in physical conditions and treated in ways that have been characterised as torture – I’ve seen disabled people, the elderly and children subjected to… Read more »
“Six Whistle Blowers over an 18 years period were identified. Two had been obliged to emigrate because they had been unable to gain future employment after they left the Organisation with supposed disciplinary matters against them unresolved. Any references obtained made it clear that they were a danger to any organisation because they would not conform. One was left homeless and had to relocate to protect their children and make sure they had a roof, food and schooling. Three investigating police officers have been removed from the case. They were all reported to be suffering significant health issues due to… Read more »
Ultimately that’s a question of: How much are we willing to spend on entertainment.
We could cut sports funding, we could cut arts funding, we could cut film-making, music production, fictional book-writing… there’s a whole lot of stuff we could cut, but the fact is that there’ll always be more we could spend on healthcare and it doesn’t make sense to make our lives a boring misery, by never spending resources having fun, in an effort to make the world a better place.
I don’t know much about Penn State except that the Crimson Tide beat them twice in a row, so I’ll talk about UA. I got a Bachelor’s from Alabama, the quintessential football school. I had a whole litany of professors who didn’t give a damn how many yards Trent Richardson averages per carry. My grade point average was my foremost consideration throughout all of college. The University of Alabama is primarily an institution of learning. The football team is one cog in that machinery. Money floods in because of football. Hundreds of thousands of people (not an exaggeration) show up… Read more »
Right! Football has nothing to do with it… …except when the gladiators are bathed in entitlement, shielded with good-ole-boy denial, raised-up as Gods among mortals, waived of standard responsibilities, bailed-out of routine crimes…boys-will-be-boys crimes about campus. I’m quite certain that the Penn State President, Art Dept Chair, Dean of Liberal Arts would have all provided similar shielding for a pedophile Graphic Arts prof working at the local community children’s programs. There are in fact classes of humans, especially in self-enthralled kingdoms with great walls of protection. Our society values this rule of humanity, else you would see poets with $21M… Read more »