There’s a powerful urge to return to normalcy around here, but it probably should be resisted.
Normalcy at Penn State means secrecy. It means a community that sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. Returning to normalcy would be a failure to learn and a missed opportunity to make this place better.
Let’s start with what the faculty can do. We’ve been hearing a lot about Penn State being a ‘top-down’ institution, meaning that governing decisions are handed down from Old Main without a lot of input from the professoriate.
Most of us, I suspect, are content with this arrangement, though we’d be embarrassed to admit it. We want to concentrate our energies on our teaching and research and leave administration of the institution to others – provided, of course, that they are wise and good. The rub is that history offers precious few instances of wise and benevolent dictators. This is why America’s founders enacted a system of checks and balances.
True, Penn State has a legislative branch in the form of the Faculty Senate, but I doubt whether even its staunchest defenders would argue that the senate has anywhere near the power of the president’s office. Perhaps what’s needed is both an increased role for Faculty Senate in the governance of the university and greater faculty involvement in the administration. As things stand now, the President’s Council is made up of a host of vice presidents of this or that and no rank-and-file professors. Faculty members are explicitly barred from serving on the Board of Trustees.
The old joke that compares employees to mushrooms – keep them in the dark and feed them ‘fertilizer’ – would seem to apply.
Case in point: Rod Erickson was the interim president of the university for eight days. Then the Board of Trustees, reacting to the scandal like someone who has slept right through his alarm clock, handed him the job outright. This is no knock on Erickson, but might the faculty have preferred to see a national search for Graham Spanier’s successor, with faculty members on the search committee?
One area where greater faculty input might be particularly useful is in the area of ethics. This semester the university offered 25 courses – taught by 35 different instructors — that had the word ‘ethics’ in their titles, including ‘Ethics in Educational Leadership’ in the College of Education, ‘Ethics in Sport and Sport Management’ in Kinesiology, ‘Values and Ethics in Human Development Professions’ in Biobehavioral Health, and ‘Ethics and Regulation in Advertising and Public Relations’ in the College of Communications.
There are also at least four centers on campus with a focus on ethics: the Center for the Study of Leadership and Ethics in the College of Education, the Rock Ethics Institute in the College of the Liberal Arts and the Don Davis Program in Ethical Leadership and the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication in the College of Communications.
That’s a pretty big pool of talent to draw from if the university wanted to create a faculty ethics committee, as English Professor Michael Berube proposed in his recent guest column in the New York Times. If such a committee had been in the loop early on, Berube wrote, we might have seen a more aggressive response to reports that a middle-aged man had been ‘horsing around’ in the showers with little kids.
What else can be done? Many commentators have concluded that the restoration of integrity at Penn State should begin with pulling the plug on the football program. It wouldn’t break my heart to see football go the way of bear-baiting (a story in The Onion that quotes God saying that He never meant for the human body to take the kind of punishment it absorbs on the gridiron contains more than a kernel of truth), but I have to agree with those who’ve said it’s unfair to punish the student-athletes for the failings of their elders.
Of far greater concern, however, would be the local economic impact of wiping out football. It’s all very well for us snobby types to say the town could stand to lose a few T-shirt emporia and pizza joints, but it’s hard to be so cavalier about the retail and hospitality industry workers and tradespeople who would lose their jobs if 100,000 fans stopped spreading their cash around Centre County on those autumn weekends.
A far better idea I heard over the Thanksgiving break would be for the university to establish a center for the study and prevention of child abuse – and to fund it with football money.
That’s just one idea. We need to generate a lot more. Which means we can’t just dive back into our class preps and our research projects and leave the decision-making to all those provosts and vice presidents and trustees.
