After being appalled by Jerry Sandusky’s crimes, I am now appalled by the official response.
Our leaders have not led; they have followed the understandable but unthinking outrage of the public. How can any thinking person consider the 1998 episode as the beginning of a cover-up? It was investigated by the police and reviewed by the district attorney. The boy himself said nothing happened.
As for the infamous shower episode of 2001, the jury acquitted Sandusky of rape in that instance. (Am I the only one who noticed this?) If they, with full details, couldn’t be sure what happened, how could Joe Paterno be sure, with only a vague account to go by?
Those whose job it really was to act on the matter, didn’t: the supervisor of campus police, the president of the university, the university’s chief lawyer, the board of trustees who hoped that the investigation would come to nothing, the CEO of Second Mile who failed to tell the charity’s board, and then-attorney general Corbett, who didn’t hasten the state’s investigation during his run for governor.
The Freeh report is clearly based on a similar lack of thought, since it lumps everything, including the 1998 case, as a cover-up perpetrated by the entire administration. The NCAA president evidently took this for gospel without an investigation of his own and acted on it. As in a witch hunt, the innocent and the guilty are now all lumped together, and Penn State as a whole unjustly condemned.
Anne Grout State College
