I know, students enjoy them, and a weekend of sports can be a fun event, and yes, they do have a strong effect on college enrollments (which always seemed bizarre to me—students actually select their academic institution based on the performance of the athletic team? But the correlations in the enrollment/season wins data all bear it out). But they also turn into hyper-inflated domains of privilege, where the coaches are paid more than faculty, students and alumni vividly demonstrate the etymological source of the term “fan”, and the athletes too often turn into swaggering assholes. Can we just have small athletic programs where it’s all for fun, and no one makes the games more important than the academics?

I am speaking, of course, of the sordid events going on at Penn State. Children are raped by an assistant coach; the staff knows about it all for a long time, and either turns a blind eye to it or whimpers among itself; nothing is done. Paterno, the head coach and king of football in Happy Valley, was allowed to sail on unperturbably, still holding his job, still coaching, and the only change in his routine was that the university wasn’t letting the press talk to him. This is the guy who knew about his defensive coach’s behavior for a long time.

There have been questions about Paterno’s role, too. Pennsylvania’s state police commissioner said the coach fulfilled his legal requirement when he told university administrators that a graduate assistant had seen Sandusky abusing a young boy in the team’s locker room shower in 2002.

2002 — Paterno let a sexual predator run free for 9 years, doing the absolute minimum to hinder him. He reported him to a superior (at Penn State, there’s someone who can boss Joe Paterno around?), but the police say that that’s where it ended — they were not informed. PSU kept it all in-house, buried.

That’s changed now. Penn State students rallied to support Paterno — just like we hear about congregations supporting child-raping priests — but to no avail. Finally, the board of trustees has done the right thing: Paterno and the university president have been fired, effective immediately.

Now if only they’d go on to do the appropriate act of scaling back the athletics program as a whole and never again allowing any coaching staff to become the kind of royalty Paterno and his crew were.

(via Comradde PhysioProffe.)

The Penn State football scandal is just sickening. One of the coaching staff, Jerry Sandusky, has a long history of sexually abusing children, and the rest of the staff were apparently baffled about what to do. You report the incidents to the police, you dummies.

A Penn State graduate assistant coach shows up at the football locker room unexpectedly, and hears slapping noises from the shower. Here’s what the report said:

“As the graduate assistant put the sneakers in his locker, he looked into the shower. He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.”

The assistant fled in fear and confusion. Much the same way a janitor fled after allegedly witnessing Sandusky engaged in a sexual act in the showers with a “young boy” — Victim 8, later described in the report as being “between the ages of 11 and 13.”

Now it’s blowing up into a major scandal involving more than just the child rapist because all these clueless guys had evidence of child rape going on, and couldn’t figure out that this was both a crime and an offense against human decency, and that it demanded immediate strong action. Action more than just talking among themselves.

I’m getting the impression that this is what happens when you’ve got an off-balance, all-male culture (and I suspect that an all-female culture would also be off-balance and pathological in other ways). Both the Catholic priesthood and football coaching are male preserves, which serves to both attract individuals with odd proclivities and generates a kind of sexual tribalism that allows them to close ranks unthinkingly to protect their own.

Now I’m wondering even more about the military. I think the women who have struggled to crack into that field have a few stories about their refractory nature, too.