Posts filed under ‘Campus issues’
A Timely Class in Journalism Ethics
From our intern, Emily Kaplan:
Over the weekend, a friend of mine tweeted: Boy, what I would do to sit in on a journalism ethics class at Penn State this week.
I am fortunate to be enrolled in that course this semester—COMM 409: News Media Ethics, a section taught by Malcolm Moran, a veteran journalist and head of Penn State’s John Curley Center for Sports Journalism.
My friend was right—Tuesday’s lesson was never more relevant. When I walked in, I had pretty good feeling we wouldn’t be discussing the assigned reading on the syllabus. Not after a weekend where dubious reporting and social media gone wild resulted in an announcement that the most recognizable face of this university had died—when in fact, he was still alive.
“There’s nothing more important to be right about than if an important figure is alive or not,” Moran said. “Nothing.”
So who better to be a guest lecturer than Mark Viera ’09? He’s the New York Times reporter who dispelled reports that Joe Paterno had passed away Saturday night by simply asking a family spokesman whether the rumors were true.
The class had a meta feel. Moran asked Viera what lessons from the course he has applied to his reporting—and what lessons couldn’t be taught in the classroom. Moran also pointed out the seat that Viera occupied just a few semesters ago. The girl sitting there now has some big shoes to fill. Viera, 24, has been one of the Times’ lead journalists in Penn State coverage over the past two months because of his familiarity with the school and dogged reporting.
But Tuesday, he stood in front of about 50 of us. Everyone seemed attentive as he spoke. I don’t know whether it was respect for Moran, respect for Viera or simply respect for the subject matter, but I didn’t see one person texting under their desk or day dreaming blankly at the wall. (more…)
New Leadership for the Board of Trustees
Karen Peetz took over as chair of the Board of Trustees.
Generally, the January meeting of Penn State’s Board of Trustees is a pretty straightforward affair. There’s a lot of routine business to take care of—choosing meeting dates for the next calendar year, authorizing the president to confer degrees at commencement—and even the more notable items, such as the board electing its officers, tend to be only minimally noteworthy.
Not so Friday, at the board’s first public meeting since the Sandusky scandal.
The meeting was moved from its usual location—the boardroom on the ground floor of the Nittany Lion Inn—to the larger ballroom on the first floor. We in the media got hand-stamped at the door, assuring us entrée into the post-meeting news conference. Milling around outside the inn were alumni with signs supporting “due process for Joe Paterno,” and milling around inside was a larger-than-usual number of police officers.
And although the day started slowly—at one point, the Twitter hashtag #PSUBOT was agog over the revelation that Penn State had purchased 20,000 pounds of peanut butter in anticipation of a rise in peanut prices, interesting but hardly the key news everyone was waiting for—by the end, there was plenty of news to digest:
—Steve Garban ’59 stepped down as the chair of the board, and John Surma ’76—who made the announcement that Paterno and president Graham Spanier were gone—stepped down as the vice chair. (Garban and Surma will remain on the board; they simply gave up leadership positions.)
—The board elected new leaders. The chair is Karen Peetz ’77, vice chairman and CEO of financial markets and treasury services of the Bank of New York Mellon, who was elected by the board as a representative of business and industry in 2010. The vice chair is Keith Masser ’73, chairman and CEO of Sterman Masser Inc., a family farm, and who was elected by agricultural societies in 2008. Each ran unopposed. (more…)
Why Child Sexual Abuse Goes Unreported: A Sociologist Explains
“Everybody likes to think they would be the whistleblower. What I told my class was this: Statistically, you’re full of crap.” —Eric Silver
Of the 28 pages of essays we published in our January/February issue, which we devoted to the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath, none has received more responses than Eric Silver’s. Silver, a professor of sociology and crime, law, and justice, contributed a piece we titled “Bureaucracy, Loyalty, and Truth.”
We introduced the piece like this: “Everyone says they’d report suspected child abuse to the authorities, but most don’t. A Penn State sociologist dissects the powerful forces that prevent us from doing so.”
Silver’s perspective—based largely on his specialty, the sociology of deviance, and a class lecture he gave just days after the charges against Sandusky were filed—really struck a chord with readers. Because of the large response, we’ve decided to make the piece available here. —Lori Shontz, senior editor
I teach a class in the sociology of deviance, and we were covering the topic of adult-child sexual contact when this happened. The students had a homework assignment related to it due the night before all this broke. It was an eerie thing.
I felt like I needed to say something in class—to put the crisis in a sociological context. Two ideas came to me—one is bureaucracy, and the second is loyalty.
Everything in our world is organized by bureaucracies. You go to the grocery store, and your food’s always there, it’s on the shelves—that’s a very complex task, and it’s organized by a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are very good at complex tasks, because they break up those tasks into small pieces that individuals can be responsible for. We’re all familiar with that in our own work lives: If we run into trouble, we tell so-and-so, and that’s it. It’s off our plate, and we continue to do what we’re supposed to do.
In this case, I don’t know the facts any more than anybody else does, but it seems as though there was reporting upward, which most of the time you’re encouraged to do. The big question is: Why didn’t people follow up after they reported upward? In some ways, it’s not a fair question. Our job descriptions aren’t to police our bosses.
I realize that everybody likes to think they would be the whistleblower. They are the ones who would risk their job, their livelihood, their future, their letters of recommendation. This belief fuels our righteous indignation at those involved. What I told my class was this: Statistically, you’re full of crap. For every 1,000 people, you’re lucky if there are two or three whistleblowers. (more…)
Reflecting on Two Months—and Two Scandals
My mom didn’t get it.
In our phone conversation on Nov. 11, it was clear she didn’t understand the weight of the allegations against Jerry Sandusky, the firing of Joe Paterno, the nuclear fallout that was Penn State in those first few days.
“Imagine this happening at Syracuse,” I said. She instantly understood.
I’m not a Penn Stater. I grew up in central New York, as did most of my family and friends. And while the Sandusky scandal shook me as an employee of the University and writer for The Penn Stater, the feeling was, for the most part, once removed.
I didn’t grow up worshiping Paterno, spending Saturdays in Beaver Stadium, or bleeding blue and white. The only way I could begin to empathize with Penn Staters, and the only way I could convey the crisis to my mother, was to imagine the same scenario rocking the biggest college in our proximity, and my alma mater, Syracuse University.
Exactly one week later, it did. (more…)
Alumni Ask Questions; President Erickson Answers
Rodney Erickson and moderator Patty Satalia took questions from Pittsburgh-area Penn State alumni for about 90 minutes on Tuesday night.
Rodney Erickson promised “openness and communication.” He promised them twice, in fact, during his opening statement Wednesday night at a town hall meeting with alumni in Pittsburgh. He called those values his “guiding principles and watchwords,” ones he learned growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, and he said they’ve served him well during his career in higher education, the past 34 years at Penn State and the past nine weeks as the University’s president.
“I know there’s a perception that we at Penn State have not always done as well as we could to be open, to respond to questions and to be as transparent as possible with all of our constituencies—alumni, faculty, staff, our students, and the public and the media who report on our great university,” he said. “We will do better in the future based on those guiding principles of openness and communication that I just stated. I’m here this evening to begin to demonstrate these values.”
He promised, also, to listen to whatever the more than 600 alumni who attended the town hall had to say about the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath. (And anything else.) Those alumni took Erickson at his word. They were polite, but they didn’t hold back.
The first speaker introduced herself by saying that she’d brought her baby daughter and son home from the hospital in Penn State sleepers “because (more…)
Nice Work by The Daily Collegian
This video, produced by two staffers at The Daily Collegian, Krista Myers and Katherine Rodriguez, has gotten a lot of play on Twitter recently, and it’s easy to see why. Titled “We Are … Penn State—Students’ Reactions to the Events in Happy Valley,” the video is shot in arresting black and white, and it features Penn State students talking about what the past six weeks have been like and why they are still loyal to their school. It runs for a little over four minutes, and it’s well worth your time.
This seems like a good time, as well, to salute the work that all of the Collegian journalists have done over the past month. I know for a fact that some of them haven’t been to class quite as often since the first week of November, and I truly hope their professors took the circumstances into account. There are some things you can’t learn in a classroom, and covering a story like this is one of them.
These journalists were in the middle of everything—asking questions at the attorney general’s news conference, being pepper-sprayed while covering the riot, summing up Joe Paterno’s 61-year-career at the University with a special section on a day’s notice, publishing the first Sunday edition in the paper’s history. Back when I was all but living in the Collegian office, way back in the pre-Internet era, we stopped publishing during finals week. But these students continued to write stories, shoot video and photos, and tweet during the Thanksgiving week break, and they’re still on the job during this finals week.
They’ve covered the story fairly and accurately and comprehensively: You can find an index of all of their coverage here.
What do they do for an encore? I have no idea. As veteran sports journalist Malcolm Moran, the Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society in the College of Communications, noted in this interview, “What do you do if you’re 20 years old and you’re covering the story of your life? One friend of mine said, ‘I’ve been doing this 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.’ ”
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Your Letters on the Scandal
As a teenager, I wrote a “Dear Abby” style column for my high-school newspaper. I, the advice guru, would respond to “Stressed Senior” or “Perplexed Prom Date” with a witty, convenient solution to the problem in 300 words or less.
Truth be told, most of the letter writers were my friends, whom I’d convince to detail recent heartbreaks or college-rejection sagas for the student body’s reading pleasure. And my advice was mostly banal—Take a bubble bath! Call a friend!
More interesting, though, was the relief my friends seemed to find in just writing about their feelings. Despite my nagging to do so, expressing their emotions publicly provided a catharsis that even confiding in a best friend during study hall could not.
Today, I’m the letters editor at The Penn Stater. This means I’m responsible for organizing the manageable handful of compliments, criticisms, and occasional corrections we receive for the previous issue, and editing them for print. The methodical process has become an almost-soothing constant in the rushed weeks before deadline.
On Nov. 4, that, like everything else at Penn State, changed. (more…)
A Town Hall Session on the Scandal
Patrick Mansell took this photo for Penn State Live.
The most dramatic moment happened almost an hour into Tuesday night’s Town Hall Forum, in which President Rodney Erickson and seven other top University officials took questions from Penn State students.
Students had never before had such an opportunity—not in “the history of the whole university,” student government president TJ Bard stressed in his introduction—and the ones who came took it seriously. They pressed for assurances that the Sandusky scandal would not affect their internship or job prospects, wondered why no undergraduate students were named to the special investigations task force appointed by the Board of Trustees, and asked whether Penn State’s commitment to transparency would include reassessing its exemption from Pennsylvania’s open-records law.
Then a woman stood up and said she not only had a question, but that she wanted to tell the eight administrators on the stage how she felt: “I don’t know if all of you feel this way, but Jerry Sandusky is part of the Penn State family. And I feel shame.”
The room fell silent, broken by one loud clap of approval. Then the woman added, softly, “What do I do with these feelings?”
More silence. And suddenly, the forum took on a different feel. It wasn’t about who may have done what or how things should have been handled or what the University is doing to recover from this, but about the emotions that Penn Staters have been coping with over the past 27 days.
The officials rallied. Hank Foley ’82g, vice president for research and dean of the graduate school didn’t even wait for the microphone before he said, “Acknowledge them.” Once he got the mic, he added, “We have to acknowledge them, recognize how how you feel. And admittedly, a lot of us feel some of the same feelings. There’s nothing wrong with feeling like that. At all. And there’s nothing wrong with expressing that, either. I think it’s completely understandable.” (more…)
How Can We Support Sex Abuse Victims? A SOC 119 Perspective
Early in the second class he devoted to the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath, Sam Richards asked his SOC 119 students to react to this statement: I am feeling exhausted talking about this issue.
This was Nov. 15, only 12 days after the grand jury presentation was released. Less than a week after Joe Paterno had been fired and Graham Spanier had resigned, and nine days since the national media began to arrive on campus. Almost all of the 700 students, voting anonymously with clickers, chose “strongly agree” or “agree.” Imagine what the percentage would be now, with the TV trucks no longer parked on College Avenue and the football team’s regular season over.
Richards then asked students to pair off and kick around solutions to this question: What would it mean to support the victims of sexual assault and sexual abuse? The most common answers: donating money to organizations that support victims, and listening to anyone who wanted to talk about a similar experience.
And then Richards tied the two questions together: “What would it mean to support the victims? No. 1, it would probably not mean being tired of talking about it. After nine days. What is that? We have done a whole semester on race, and we’re not really tired of talking about race, but we’re tired talking about this issue after nine days.”
The way Richards sees it, (more…)
RAINN Campaign Edges Closer to $500,000
Like everything else in the past two weeks, things at Proud to be a Penn Stater have been moving at warp speed.
Since its launch on Nov. 10, the grassroots group founded by a handful of Penn Staters has raised more than $463,000 for RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network—and earned plenty of media coverage in the process.
Co-founder Larena Lettow ’98 appeared on CNN’s American Morning last Thursday, and MSNBC, Huffington Post, Time, and a handful of blogs (including ours) have covered the group’s fundraising efforts. Proud to be a Penn Stater has a goal of raising $500,000 for RAINN by Thanksgiving.
There are some new ways to help: T-shirts with the phrase “[Still] Proud to be a Penn Stater” are available for $18, with proceeds going directly to RAINN, and cell phone users can text PSU4RAINN to 20222 to make an automatic $10 donation.
Funds raised will support RAINN’s Online Hotline, which provides free support for victims of sexual abuse. The hotline has seen a 54 percent increase in calls since news of the Sandusky scandal broke two weeks ago.
Mary Murphy, associate editor
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