As I write this blog, I am saddened by the ongoing debacle involving Joe Paterno and the Penn State football program. I grew up watching Penn State football; my father graduated from there, and we spent countless autumn Saturday afternoons during my childhood watching games on TV. Even today, we are always on the phone or texting each other about the games. And during all of this, Joe Paterno has been part of the conversation; he is only a couple of weeks older than my father, who has reveled in Joe’s seeming indestructibility. Five years ago, my brother and I helped my father celebrate his birthday with a trip to Happy Valley to watch a Penn State game and stay at an inn partially owned by Paterno. My dad showed us the sights, including the hotel where he and our mother spent their wedding night. JoePa has been an unofficial member of the family forever.
He always has seemed to represent a fading ideal of honor and accountability, possessed of a magical ability to mix academic pursuits with the seemingly dirty business of big time college sports without degrading the University, its students, and its ideals. Obviously, all of these perspectives have been turned upside-down. While many details remain to be determined regarding the rapidly evolving story of an assistant coach’s alleged sexual predation and apparent cover-up by Paterno and other university leaders, Paterno is, at the very least, responsible for astonishingly poor judgment.
So, why write about this “current event” in this week’s blog? I do so because bad things can happen to good universities. No institution can assure that one of its employees or students will not commit a heinous offense, but it can take steps to minimize the risks and effectively respond when confronted with evidence, no matter how painful or embarrassing the outcomes may be. I am proud to work at a University where a cover-up is frankly unthinkable, as a culture of accountability permeates Georgetown and its senior leadership. Moreover, cover ups never work, and always seem to snowball — think Watergate, Anthony Weiner, and virtually every other political scandal of the past fifty years.
I am fortunate that during my tenure as Lombardi’s Director our culture has been strong enough to minimize serious ethical violations of academic integrity. However, the Penn State tragedy reinforces the essential truth that we all have moral obligations to ourselves, to the University and to the broader society to forthrightly address improprieties if we find them, without consideration of the downstream consequences. We have a number of resources available to support our faculty and staff should the need arise. But most of all, we all must remember a simple truth that I learned from my mother (who never watched a single minute of football in her whole life) – what’s right is right.