Friday, November 25, 2011

The Paterno Problem

Way back in 2005 Vicky Triponey, compliance officer for the university, wrote to the PSU president that Paterno was secretive and insisted on disciplining his "student-athletes" as he saw fit not as required by PSU's rules and regulations. She also pointed out that
Coach Paterno would rather we NOT inform the public when a football player is found responsible for committing a serious violation of the law and/or our student code . . . despite any moral or legal obligation to do so.
And of course nothing was done.[1] How bad do you think things are on one of the bigger income generating teams? At some point, the steady drip of yearly corruption, and I don't mean the nonsense like Ohio State's tattoo scandal, is going to sink the whole mess. My suggestion for the various college administrations is to privatize their athletic departments; sell the whole mess to the NFL and the NBA as  pre-made audience filled minor league sport leagues for multiple billions of dollars and then use the money to rebuild higher education.

[1]To be fair the article linked quotes others from Triponey's time at PSU, she quit in  2007, saying na uh, we did so oversee Paterno's football factory and everybody was hyper ethical and really good. Given what we now know, I'll leave it to you to decided if anything was, in fact, done to rein in Paterno's protection of criminals.

2 comments:

  1. Higher education is not the business of colleges competitive sports is.

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  2. That's what the AD wants us to think but the fact is most schools lose money on athletics and, clearly, the culture of corruption is endemic to the enterprise and, consequently, any competent administrator ought to end the whole mess now. Of course, there are few honest administrators out there; so the question answers itself.

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