Policing the “Penn State Crisis”

Proem

The cover of Penn State University’s January/February 2012 alumni magazine, The Penn Stater, was a stark departure from previous covers. Rather than featuring beautiful campus scenes or profiles of prominent alumni, editor Tina Hay and her staff tackled head-on the unfolding crisis/scandal/tragedy at Penn State ¹ : revelations that a well-known former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, allegedly sexually assaulted numerous children over a decade-long period—as well as the resulting indictments, ² firings, media coverage, and community responses. ³ Calling it “dark, demented, and perfect,” Deadspin’s Luke O’Brien (2011, para. 2) described it thus:

What really stands out, though, is the “Our Darkest Days” cover, designed by Carole Otypka, the magazine’s art director. It’s black and heavy and stark. The letters that spell “Penn State” in the magazine’s title have collapsed into a perfectly grim illustration of what the Sandusky scandal has done to the school. The ringfort around Happy Valley has been demolished. The scales have dropped. The Kool-Aid is overturned. ⁴

All these are applicable terms that can be applied to the crisis/scandal/tragedy still unfolding at Penn State University and continuing to reverberate throughout the public sphere. Since first coming to light in November 2011, the story of Penn State has taken numerous twists and turns. University President Graham Spanier was forced to resign. Legendary head football coach, Joe Paterno, was fired midseason, and a few months later, he passed away due to complications stemming from lung cancer. Senior Vice President Gary Schultz and Athletic Director Timothy Curley were indicted for perjury and not reporting the 2002 incident at the heart of the grand jury testimony; Schultz resigned, and Curley was placed on administrative leave while awaiting trial. And a mainstream media feeding frenzy dominated headlines for nearly a month, before it moved on to the “next big thing.” ⁵ Stealing a phrase from Stuart Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts (1978), it is necessary to police this crisis, to create a critical dialogue focused on history and politics as they unfold in front of us as it relates to violence, power, and the neoliberal university; big-time college athletics; and the wider social arena.

The starting point for this dialogue is painful, and tragic. There is no technical, legal, bureaucratic solution to the attacks of sexual predators. Coaches and administrators can be fired, but these reactive (rather than proactive) responses cannot prevent sexual assaults, ethical lapses, or the loss of one’s moral compass. No amount of money, no computer or video surveillance system, will completely stop these actions. To think otherwise is to participate in an escalating, self-destructive process that is guaranteed to produce further transgressions, more destroyed lives.

Furthermore, there is no way the neoliberal university can effectively police itself if it insists on hiring outside agencies to determine when and if ethics and laws have been broken. If it insists that the corporate brand is more important than its mission to educate free moral agents. If it insists that procedures in place to protect the university are more important than protecting the vulnerable, the abused, or the mistreated.

Starting from this perspective, the dialogue must move in at least three directions at the same time. First, we must begin with the personal and the biographical, the human tragedies following the alleged child molestations. Who will tell the abused children’s stories? Who speaks for/with them? In this vein, we need critical, humane discourses that create sacred and spiritual spaces for persons and their moral communities, spaces where people can express and give meaning to this human tragedy and its aftermath. This project will work back and forth, connecting the personal, the political, and the pedagogical. Importantly, this needs to include the participation of Penn State students, faculty, alumni, and those living within the Happy Valley community.

Second, critical discourse must be launched at the level of the media, as well as the ideological, including discourses on higher education and the American university, the sports–industrial complex, myths and heroes, and the silences surrounding sexual violence, victims, social justice, and nonviolent protest. We need justice without recrimination. We need calm deliberations. We must resist actions that could erode human rights and civil liberties. We must ask, “Whose justice?” “Whose university?”

This is because what we do not have is a strong independent critical press in the United States in the first place (McChesney, 2000, p. x), at least one that doesn’t reside solely in online spaces of social media, the blogosphere, or small start-up channels. What we do have, though, is a corporate media that can instantly produce a sea of violent images, a media with a memory but no critical history (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 126). Corporate media from ESPN to CNN have more or less uncritically adopted the “Penn State is the victim and the villain narrative,” with Joe Paterno treated as the supreme victim following his dismissal by the university after 46 years of service for what the Board of Trustees deemed a “failure of leadership” (Red & O’Keeffe, 2012). Yet while many view him as a victim of the Board of Trustees or of a vapid infotainment media system screaming for blood, what has often been left out is his implication in the very same system he helped create—the mega university with the sterling brand name. Many feel betrayed, let down; a sense of collective outrage is experienced. “How could this have happened to such a good man?” the narrative goes. Let down by moral cowards, they ask, “Why didn’t somebody else act on this sooner?”

Such a narrative is straightforward, easy to digest: Benign techno-capitalism and the values of the neoliberal American university were attacked that fateful day when Paterno was fired. Working from this premise, acting under the umbrella of moral outrage, an uncritical media–entertainment complex moved quickly. Media pundits everywhere blamed the event on the singular sexual predator, or on incompetent administrators, or on out-of-control athletic programs. Conservatives said we were making victims of heroes. The Left said we had gone soft on sports. The transition to a reactionary discourse sped up:

Violence becomes taken for granted, if not valorized (“men must be men”).

Sexual violence in sports is an aberration.

Let universities do their own policing; keep the police/government out.

An attack on JoePa is an attack on Penn State, on us.

The sound bites go on and on, yet they do not address the fundamental, systemic problems at hand.

Third, we need a critical, national conversation about what happened at Penn State, because Penn State is not an aberration. We live in a culture that produces if not sanctions sexual violence, from the hallowed halls of military academies (see Ukman, 2011) and religious institutions (see Goodstein, 2012) to the everyday spaces of daily life (see Rabin, 2011), popular music and television (see Dines, 2011; Silverstein, 2009), and, increasingly, legislative acts (see Davenport, 2012). At the same time, we must be vigilant against the forces of self-righteous indignation. We cannot let democratic dialogue be eviscerated in a time of crisis. And we cannot let the dominant political discourse be shaped by the needs and voices of multinational corporations, billionaire institutional donors, television broadcast partners, and so forth (Giroux, 2000a, p. 13; Giroux, 2000b, p. 15).

In the case of Penn State, what we do need is to hear from a coalition of voices across the political, cultural, intellectual, and (inter)disciplinary spectra. We need an honest conversation about the deleterious impact of neoliberalism on higher education—about the outright assaults on higher education and public employees engaged in by right-wing conservatives (see Goodall, 2012). With regard to the sport–institution relationship, we also need to ask, “How do we want our universities and our sporting bodies to be interconnected and regulated?” “Should they even be interconnected?” “What would it mean to have universities without sporting bodies?” And we must enter into a conversation about a practical, progressive politics, a radical discourse linking “ethics, politics, and power” (Giroux, 2000b, p. 25) in the historical present, for the need to be radical, utopian, and humane has never been greater.

This Special Issue is one step in that direction.

Reading the “Penn State Crisis”

The “Penn State Crisis” is not a singular event. Rather, it is a collection of experiences, discourses, performances, and meditations revealed over and against decades of social, cultural, political, and economic imperatives within collegiate athletics, higher education, the corporate university, and a wider “biopolitics of disposability” (Giroux, 2010) within the United States that increasingly favors the wealthy and powerful at the expense of all other interests, especially young people. Its meanings are constantly moving, always in flux, unfolding, month by month, back and forth from the personal to the political—from stories in the media to personal accounts to damning criticisms to reasonable defenses.

Initial reactions to the grand jury report that a former collegiate football coach anally raped a young child in the locker room of a public university were a mix of shock and rage. In November 2011, as the story became marked by arrests, firings, campus riots and vigils, conflicting reports, and so forth, we invited a wide range of scholars across multiple disciplines to offer their critical reflections on the matter. The invitation read in part:

In the aftermath of 9/11/01, we invited a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to write short pieces on the event for what became a Special Issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, and later a book, titled 9/11 in American Culture. ⁶

Given the recent events that have transpired with respect to Penn State University and its football program, the human tragedy, student reactions, and the abuse of power/corruption of the neoliberal university, we are again imagining a similar project. As Henry Giroux (2011) noted, “The issue here is not simply about a morally depraved culture of silence, it is about a university surrendering its mission as a democratic public sphere where students learn to think critically, hold power accountable, and connect knowledge and social relations to the social costs they enact.”

Along these lines, we are inviting you to contribute a short, critical piece (1,500-2,000 words) on the events from whichever perspective/approach you see fit. We would need your manuscript by no later than March 1, 2012.

Forty-one scholars, 18 of whom have direct ties to Penn State University as either current or former graduate students or professors, answered our call, resulting in the 26 articles that follow. These articles are loosely organized into five topical sections that emerged organically throughout the process: (a) critical analyses of institutional violence and abuse, (b) indictments of the neoliberal university and the broader commodification of higher education, (c) media coverage of the crisis, (d) spaces of resistance, and (e) interrogating the role of coaches, athletics and, in particular, the complicated legacy of Joe Paterno. These articles are preceded by Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux’s opening essay, which adroitly contextualizes the totality of the crisis.

Section I is marked by powerful critiques and personal reflections on violence and abuse. To begin, Karen M. Staller eloquently weaves together three vignettes of “the priest,” “the coach,” and “the pediatrician” to unmask sexual exploitation in institutional settings.

Gaile S. Cannella and Michele Salazar Perez then offer feminist readings of capitalism, violence, and power, drawing especially on “violent patriarchal stories”—including their own, both personal and professional—to address the embeddedness of women within “male-dominated social systems and arrangements that facilitate and reinforce intersecting oppressions and domination.”

Mirka Koro-Ljungberg concludes the section with a meditation on “living the question of responsibility” as it relates to sexual harassment within institutions in general and academia in specific.

Section II shifts the discussion to the question of higher education and the university under the throes of neoliberalism. Greg Dimitriadis begins by explaining how the idea of “excellence” has come to be redefined by the skillful management of market logics (e.g., academic quality, student satisfaction, and collegiate athletics) rather than traditional concerns with culture and value.

Charles R. Garoian ruminates on the fear of scandal (and subsequent loss of capital) operative within a university structure such as the one Dimitriadis describes. This fear, he argues—of losing control, power, influence, and undoubtedly revenue—contributed to the “dereliction of moral responsibility, a deliberate cover-up, and a misguided belief in the irreproachability of the football program and the University.”

C. Michael Elavsky reflects back on his arrival on the Penn State campus as a new assistant professor. To that end, he discusses what it popularly means to assimilate into Happy Valley—the cohesion of the student body, the sense of institutional pride, and the spectacle of football—and deconstructs the suspension of one’s critical faculties needed to become one with that space.

Jordan Bass, Joshua I. Newman, and Michael D. Giardina direct us to the twinned narratives of victimology and market logics as they seek to unsettle the spectacle of civic branding engulfing Penn State. The resultant “market-based victimhood”—realized in students decrying a perceived loss of their own potential earnings based on damage to their (Penn State) brand—becomes the focal point from which the authors direct broader attention to similar narratives circulating among the so-called 1% of bankers, financiers, and Wall Street executives who have similarly presented themselves as “victims” in the current economy.

David Altheide and John Johnson argue that the crisis illustrates how mass media entertainment logic promotes scandal, suffering, and retribution on one hand and the cultural logic of big-time university athletic factories, on the other hand. They further argue that the “scandal” reveals important distinctions between “normal crimes” and scandals, with the latter providing evidence of institutional or leadership corruption.

Alberto “Beto” Guiterrez and Peter McLaren conclude the section with a critique of cultures of silence, “snitching,” and “whistle-blowing” governing both Penn State and larger institutional structures. To do this, they first turn to filmic and historical examples of “snitching”/“whistle-blowing” (e.g., On the Waterfront, A View From the Bridge, Scent of a Woman, Dead Poets Society, Spartacus, The Insider, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Operation TIPS, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Garcetti v. Ceballos, etc.). Then, they read those understandings over and against the events as played out within the sports–industrial complex in general and the Penn State case in particular.

Section III engages directly with media representations and/or criticisms of the crisis itself. Melba Hoffer’s essay explores the relationship of pragmatism and esteem operative within the institutional responses to the crisis. In particular, she questions the larger philosophical response, arguing that as a public relations crisis, the parties involved made every effort to protect their “brand” identity, but as a moral crisis that required “the ethical agent to surrender its pride and reputation as a gesture of repentance,” the response was woefully inadequate.

Jennifer M. Proffitt and Thomas F. Corrigan direct attention to the brand logics of the public relations crisis Hoffer elucidates, especially regarding the “extent that the branding of athletics programs has become a structural imperative” within the university. More specifically, they enumerate the various brand logics that may have contributed to disincentivizing full disclosure and transparency in the first place.

Cheryl Cooky examines the “situated silences” in media coverage of the crisis—that is, the discourses that are privileged (e.g., sympathetic coverage of Paterno) at the expense of others (e.g., a lack of discussion of sexual abuse and sexual violence in sport and the ways in which cultures of athletics normalize, and often celebrate, various forms of violence). As one result, she argues, the institutional center of sport within the university was actively reaffirmed within reporting of the Penn State scandal.

Brian Ott similarly interrogates media coverage of the crisis, pointing out ESPN’s construction of hypermasculine citizenship (i.e., heroes and villains, “real men” and “sissies,” etc.) and episodic rather than thematic framing of the scandal (i.e., blaming the administrators and perpetrators involved rather than addressing deeper institutional questions and concerns, such as the ever-growing role of collegiate athletics in university-wide policy and decision making).

Section IV offers three perspectives on spaces of resistance. Synthia Sydnor’s performative cultural anthropology of the crisis draws from history, Greek classics, theology, and “writing culture” to complicate any straightforward reading of Penn State. Instead of any such black or white reading of the crisis, she argues that there is always already a fractured, partial narrative at play in the modern world working to construct institutions that we “know,” such as Penn State or the Catholic Church.

Heather Adams, Jeremy Engels, Michael J. Faris, Debra Hawhee, and Mark Hlavacik, all of whom are affiliated with Penn State University’s Center for Democratic Deliberation, discuss their design and enactment of a “teach-in” centered on “a flexible pedagogical resource.” This resource, an interactive website titled “Deliberation in the Midst of Crisis” (see http://cdd.la.psu.edu/education/deliberation-in-the-midst-of-crisis), includes deliberation guidelines and pedagogical materials (i.e., links to news articles, YouTube videos, discussion questions about leadership, athletics, abuse, satire, etc). As an example of critical media literacy, Adams and her colleagues are representative of Penn State community members taking a vested interest in the health of their community beyond protecting a brand name or revenue stream.

In a similar fashion, Jennifer Motter, Yuha Jung, Lillian Lewis, Amy Bloom, and Yenju Lin—all current doctoral students at Penn State—discuss their production of alternative and personal narratives through the medium of postcard art and public display. In concert with Penn State University’s Graduate Art Education Association, the authors organized an exhibition, titled Post Silence, at Penn State’s Zoller Gallery, which provided a public space where all community members could express how they felt about these incidents by creating postcards and exhibiting them at the gallery, thus allowing diverse voices to be heard.

Section V concludes the Special Issue, focusing specific attention on both the complex spaces of football in American society as well as the legacy surrounding Joe Paterno. Although the extent of Paterno’s actual role in the scandal is open to debate (i.e., according to most reports, he informed his direct superior of the rumors regarding Sandusky in fulfillment of university protocols but did not seem go beyond such technical adherence to those protocols), the overwhelming amount of media attention given to his role and position of power within the university (as well as to the fallout from his firing and, later, death) cannot be understated.

Indeed, it is the specter of Paterno—an ever-present icon emblematic of Penn State for nearly half a century—that has haunted much of the media fascination with the Penn State crisis in the first place. As one of us (Norman) recalls,

The first time I saw JoePa live

was from the 40-yard-line in

Memorial Stadium on the University of Illinois campus;

it was the late 1990s.

A warm, sunny October afternoon,

Midwest football weather.

Joe walked the sidelines,

a familiar figure:

 high-water tan trousers,

  blue windbreaker,

   dark glasses,

    white Nike sneakers.

He seemed distant and near,

preoccupied and intense,

as if he were present and absent at the same time.

He did not stand near the quarterback.

He did not send in plays.

He did not speak to players when they came off the field.

He was just there:

 familiar and strange,

  near and far.

   Just there.

    A presence. ⁷

Chief Illiniwek danced at halftime.

We left before the game was over.

Illinois lost.

And now Joe is gone.

Illinois’ fake Chief dances no more.

And I wonder what the absence of the Chief and JoePa means today.

As such, it is appropriate that significant attention be focused on Paterno in the pages of this Special Issue, for he is both a key producer and a product of “Penn State” and its community.

Brian T. Gearity and Jim Denison begin this section by providing a brief historical overview of intercollegiate coaching that begins ca. 1850 with Yale versus Harvard crew contests and moves forward to the advent of college football in the late 1800s. In the process, they identify long-standing critiques of both college athletics and coaching practices and offer recommendations for the educator-coach model (i.e., a coach who takes a holistic or liberal view of the athlete’s self along the lines of citizenship, vocation, character, care, etc.) to supplant the predominant performance-based coach model (i.e., win at all costs).

Patti Lather examines the crisis from what she terms a becoming feminist perspective that is not so much about intervening from the outside but intra-acting from within. This intra-actionality forces Lather to look to what is formed in the spaces between materiality and discursivity within her own subjectivity (as a [recovering] Catholic, with a family history in sports, as a secondary school teacher, etc.) toward the aim of uncovering what is “differently seeable.”

Ellen Moore connects the spaces of youth sports programs to that of Sandusky’s Second Mile charity in a discussion of predation and “at-risk” and “underserved” youth. Larger structural inequalities surrounding race, class, and age, she argues, must be considered as enabling factors that allow crimes such as those committed by Sandusky to occur.

Robert E. Rinehart, reflecting on the scandal from “down under” in New Zealand, connects his discussion of coach–player power dynamics to the context outlined by Gearity/Denison, Lather, and Moore above. Through sharp prose, he considers his inculcation into sporting norms via interaction with coaches as a child (in both high school football and competitive swimming), concluding that the Sandusky/Penn State scandal is not so much representative of “a tsunami of sexual power politics” that stands outside of history as it is symptomatic and emblematic of the kind of widespread violence “done on young innocents in sport on a daily basis.”

Michael L. Butterworth shifts the discussion from sports in general to that of Paterno in specific, offering a critical analysis on public memory in shaping Paterno’s “legacy.” The very fact of this public memory, he argues, invites us to address one another as a public, for Paterno’s legacy is unavoidably a reflection of our own.

David J. Leonard offers a damning indictment of White patriarchy and privilege as revealed in the kind of memorializing Butterworth dissects above. In particular, Leonard speaks to the “nostalgia for yesteryear” that flows through much of the Paterno legacy (if not hagiography), a hearkening back to the “good old days” of coach–player relationships (which, we know, were often ruthless and authoritarian) and the resuscitation of heroic White masculinity.

Davis Houck offers a counternarrative that warns against rushes to judgment concerning hyper-mediated scandals at the same time he reflexively revisits his own culpability in reacting to the scandal. Through rhetorical criticism, Houck unpacks the dominant narratives that emerged—especially regarding Paterno—while simultaneously being mindful to the text that he is a Penn State alum who interacted with the Paternos while a student at the institution.

Michael Bérubé, who holds the Paterno Family Professor in Literature chair at Penn State, offers his perspective on how the Paternos’ academic legacy to the university “makes the scandal worse, or more complicated, insofar as their reputation for academic integrity was well earned.” He also makes an appeal for the principle of “shared governance” to actually mean something moving forward as the university attempts to recover the “shattered trust” caused by this crisis.

Ronald J. Pelias concludes the Special Issue with poetic inquiry that moves beyond Penn State and Paterno to explore “how individuals who held considerable public admiration might deal with the disgrace of their shameful acts and how the public might process the downfall of those they once called great.”

Coda

In his well-received essay titled “Growing up Penn State: The End of Everything at State College,” Michael Weinreb (2011) critically and emotionally reflects on his time growing up in Happy Valley. He notes in particular,

There was no way to extricate the happenings at our school from the happenings at the university, and the happenings at the university always centered around football. Everything in State College—even the name of our town—was one all-encompassing, synergistic monolith, and Joe Paterno was our benevolent dictator, and nothing truly bad ever happened, and even when it did, it was easier just to blot it from our lives and move on. [. . .] I don’t know what it feels like to grow up there now. I want these things to disappear from my consciousness, but they won’t. The place where I grew up is gone, and it’s not coming back. (para. 3, para. 14)

But here’s the thing: That the Happy Valley he once knew is “not coming back” can be a force for good. Because, as Arundhati Roy (2000) once wrote about those dreams that exist in the shadows, of hushed whispers guarding the secrets of power, of imagined communities shielding us from the truths that lie beneath the shiny façade: “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable” (p. 7).

As are we, too, accountable: as privileged academics, we have a moral and professional obligation to speak the truth, to expose lies, and see events in their historical perspective (Chomsky, 1967). Additionally, as members of our respective campus communities, we have a responsibility to our communities to push for greater transparency and accountability in our institutions, to join and support faculty unions, to resist the further neoliberalization of higher education. “We are fiddling with evaluation metrics while the university burns,” writes Bud Goodall (2012). “We are hiding behind the very traditions that are under attack and we are largely opting out of service in a war whose outcome, if we lose it, will eventually imprison us all” (p. 239).

We have a job to do; let’s get to it . . . before it’s too late.