Pederasty and Football

Just because you don’t follow football much and have been to only one game since you got here, doesn’t get you off the hook.  There is the horror at reading the wrenching details of crimes committed where you work.  Sorrow for the children put through awful misery.  That’s enough to send you into despair, without the mythic grandstanding that sports fandom creates.  You work at a place, you have to take responsibility for the bad things that happen there, even if you had nothing to do with them.  Yet that does not mean you have to accept collective guilt either.  One way to negotiate the distance between individual and group guilt is through critique.  So here goes.

Too much about the response to the pederasty reported at Penn State has revolved around the collective “we.”  Even the remorseful public gestures for the victims have the feel of one giant narcissistic ego convulsively seeking redemption.  When the real problem is the collective “we” in the first place.  We should not be such a “we.”   We should be individuals pursuing an education, not some vast horde chanting in unison.

The big hype surrounding the football program is what got those boys into the locker room with an old pervert in the first place.  They were in awe of the players and coach, so much so that they could be lured into awful situations. 

It is belief in the goodness and power of football that now leaves fans and players unable to fathom what happened.  Just look at the stammering of ex-football players, incapable of explaining how Sandusky could do such terrible things.  Blind faith is what leads to such speechless incoherence and rage.

The collective shock that Penn State has gone through this last week must lead to more critical thinking, to a complete re-evaluation of the college sports machine.  We cannot cure or undo the crimes by coming up with one giant collective act of atonement.  The crimes were a result of the disjuncture between our collective image and the terrible interests of one person.  The Sandusky case shows how the myth can be used for sick personal interests regardless whether they contradict the public image.  The collective “we” cannot solve the crime, nor prevent some future crime.  Individuals need to act on their own in defiance of what is good for the program.  They have to stop thinking for the team and instead think for themselves.  For as everyone who has seen the time line published in the papers, everyone who has read the one mother’s anguish that no one stepped into stop the rapes, it is perfectly clear that it was the breakdown of such personal moral decision making that caused the crimes to go on unabated.

Instead of acting as a group, we have to think for ourselves and abandon the Dionysian frenzy that sweeps across every weekend.   We have to dismantle the collective myth of football, understand that the game is an entertainment, rather than a higher calling.  Otherwise, more rot and corruption, more provincial self-congratulation at our own awesomeness will lead to some further yet unimagined abuse.  A university is a collection of individuals thinking rationally and critically for themselves—that is the definition of Enlightenment which, in the end, is not a team sport.

Research as Work

Here is another weird twist in the debate over state funding for universities: academic research is what professors do for themselves and not for the university.  Increasingly this strange claim has seeped into the public discussion.  In today's local paper, a dean is quoted as saying that some faculty have adapted their schedules "to their own needs rather than the needs of the university."  As I read this I was waiting for the other shoe to drop--did we have a scandal in the making, another shot across the bow of the great ship decadence?  What have those faculty members been doing with their personalized schedules?!

I held my breath and read onwards...they have been "freeing up days for their research."   Shocking news.  I thought that research was one of the primary jobs of professors.  Publish or perish, remember that familiar refrain?

For the sake of collegial decorum, and on the off chance the quote was in error, I won't belabor the statement and instead offer you the link to read for yourselves:

http://www.centredaily.com/2011/04/11/2639266/class-differences.html

In all the political posturing, let no one imagine or insinuate that research is personal free time, a time to watch old movies and eat bon-bons on the sofa.

Research is one of the things we do here at the university.  We read books and articles, we listen to lectures, we scour the world for new ideas.  It serves the university and society at large.  We are the grunts who pump out articles and books.  Research is not a perk, some special privilege that academics get to indulge in.

Just ask the assistant professor who has been denied tenure because their book came out too slowly, or the middle aged professor who has not produced a research agenda in the last decade.  They are judged first and foremostly by their research productivity.  Research is not contrary to the university's needs, it is one of the university's primary functions, along with teaching and public service.

So let us not create the illusion that intellectual endeavor in its most intense form is just personal time, it is work.

Land Grant versus Private University

Maybe he felt the need to get out from under his father's shadow.  Maybe he was expressing the secret wish of university insiders.  Maybe he was trying to think for himself.  When Scott Paterno advocated eliminating ALL of Penn State's budgetary allocation from Harrisburg in order to shift the remaining money to public schools, he was really calling for the privatization of higher education in Pennsylvania. 

http://www.rockthecapital.com/03/09/scotts-piece-2/

Paterno argues that surely Penn State will find some way to make up the difference.  Obviously, the administration would manage to "generate" savings, but that would include eliminating many of the public services the university provides Commonwealth citizens.  Tuition would rise much more quickly than under current conditions and, more importantly, admissions would redefined.  The obligation to support students from all corners of the state would disappear.

Penn State has always prided itself on the number of students who are the first members of their family to attend college.  That is the concern of a public university.  With privatization, that idealism would fade in just a few years.  The university's broad commitment to agriculture would drop away quickly as well.  The Ag School is already under serious budgetary pressure and, without a doubt, a private university would confine its agricultural research only to those subfields that generate high federal grants or that have new commercial potential.  There would be little interest in training the children of farmers.

A private university chases an entirely different pool of applicants than a public university.  Penn State would start a much greater recruitment effort in Korea and China than in Erie or York.  Private universities have an entirely different set of peers against which they measure themselves.  This change would not come about immediately, but once the old land grant obligations are cast aside in the name of free market education which always pursues the global elite student and not the local high school kid, Penn State would move in a direction that would completely alter its relationship to the Commonwealth. 

The real losers would be society and the citizens of the state who need to educate their children.  Rural poverty would increase even further as generations would be priced out of quality higher education.  The divide between the classes would grow as Penn State woos the metropolitan elite as opposed to the rural workers.  The loss of public funding would not just end the idealism that made the university Pennsylvania's sole land grant institution in 1863, it would further diminish the quality of life for thousands in this state.