Posts filed under ‘Controversy’
Michael Mann Makes His Case
I approached the podium a few minutes before Michael Mann was scheduled to speak Thursday afternoon to ask him a simple question: Were all those police out front there because of him?
“Probably,” he smiled. “I think they’re probably superfluous, but it’s better to be safe.”
I’ve gone to probably a dozen Penn State Forum lunches in the past five years, and Thursday’s event at the Penn Stater Hotel was the first in which I’d seen a police presence. Three armed campus police officers—one from a K-9 unit—stood outside the packed conference room in which Mann spoke. I imagine they were there to stem any potential unrest after ads appeared on local radio this week urging people to boycott or protest Mann’s speech; I imagine those officers were aware as well that Mann has received death threats because of his work.
Mann, of course, is a climatologist, Penn State professor of meteorology and geosciences, and director of the University’s Earth Systems Science Center. If you know his name, it’s probably less because of his work—including his role in developing the iconic “hockey stick” model for measuring long-term global warming—than the reaction to it. U.S. Senators, state attorneys general, and TV pundits (among many others) have all gone after Mann in an attempt to discredit findings that show the reality and alarming rate of man-made global warming. If he’s not the favorite target of climate change deniers, he’s near the top of the list.
Mann’s speech Thursday was titled (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…)
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…)
We Can Tell the Magazine is Out…
…by the calls and emails we’re starting to get from readers.
First of all, no, that’s not a black box you see on the left. It’s the cover of our new January-February issue. There actually is text in there—really! The cover doesn’t render very well on screen, and it looks even worse after the blog software gets done compressing it. If you click on the image at left, you can see a much bigger and more accurate representation.
Even so, it’s definitely a dark cover, and a decidedly unusual one for us, with the masthead letters piled up at the bottom and all that. We realize that you’ll either love it or hate it. And already we’re hearing opinions about it, ranging from “I am impressed by this cover decision. Stunning” to “Seeing the cover … further plummeted me into despair! How is a cover like that moving PSU forward?!”
We might ask our art director, Carole Otypka, to talk more about the cover design in a blog post sometime.
In the meantime, readers are also commenting on what’s inside the issue, and those reactions, too, span the continuum from enthusiastic appreciation (“I already feel better about my beloved Alma Mater. What a wonderful collection of words from people who have been affected by the darkest days”) to passionate disapproval (“I found the latest edition … an ill-conceived idea and equally horrifying to read. Every page made me shake more with anger. How dare you attempt to assuage alumni with pandering articles and quotations”).
To us, the number and variety of reactions is a good thing. It means readers care, and it shows that there’s a wide range of opinions out there. Please keep the comments coming. Feel free to use the “Leave a reply” box after this post, or send us an email at pennstater@psu.edu. Thanks.
Tina Hay, editor
New Issue on the Way
We haven’t seen the finished product ourselves yet, but our printer tells me that the January-February issue of The Penn Stater is in the mail and should be arriving in mailboxes any day now.
We’re always interested in hearing how readers react to the magazine, but that’s especially true this time. We devoted more than 40 pages of the new issue to the Sandusky scandal and related news. You can get a feel for what’s in the new issue by clicking on the image above—that takes you to a larger, more readable version of the table of contents.
We think the coverage is pretty honest and unflinching. We also hope it doesn’t just rehash all the stuff you already know; instead we’ve offered—among other scandal-related stories—22 thoughtful mini-essays, by contributors ranging from Adam Taliaferro ’05 to survivors of child sexual abuse to Penn State’s first Rhodes Scholar, Tess Thompson ’97.
Please let us know what you think, either by posting a note in the Comments section here or by sending us an email at pennstater@psu.edu. We really look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Tina Hay, editor
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
More Recommended Reading: Preliminary Hearing
If you’re trying to get a handle on the last-minute announcement that Jerry Sandusky ’66, ’71g would waive his preliminary hearing, you’re not alone. I’ve spent part of the afternoon monitoring Twitter and checking out various news organizations’ coverage, and here’s what’s caught my eye:
Adam Smeltz ’05 of StateCollege.com provides a good synopsis here, and the New York Times, which obviously has a broader audience, does something similar here on its college sports blog, The Quad. This MSNBC video, featuring investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, is also good, although the studio host mangles the pronunciation of Bellefonte.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette talked to a couple of defense lawyers who are baffled by the strategy of Sandusky’s lawyer, Joe Amendola ’70. ESPN’s Lester Munson, a lawyer and journalist, gets into more of the details here, with everything from how the preliminary hearing can benefit the defense to whether the defense will eventually request a trial by judge, not jury. There’s a video of Bob Ley speaking with legal analyst Roger Cossack at the same link.
Dan Wetzel, a columnist for Yahoo Sports who has weighed in early and often on the scandal, has what might be one of the first opinion pieces published; he says that Sandusky’s late decision “put the accusers through the wringer.”
And while I don’t love everything that Deadspin does, this piece on the morning’s events is a really good read.
Please let us know in the comments if you’ve found other worthwhile stories.
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…)
Sandusky Talks to the New York Times
You can’t help but wonder how Jerry Sandusky sees the world.
Sandusky ’66, ’71g, of course, is the man whose alleged actions have emotionally scarred at least eight boys, ended the careers of Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno, and caused anguish for thousands of Penn Staters and others worldwide. You can’t help but wonder, If it’s true, what was he thinking? And what is he thinking about now, as he sees the damage done and contemplates spending possibly the rest of his life in prison?
The New York Times’ Jo Becker managed to persuade Sandusky to sit down with her to answer some of those questions. Becker spent four hours with Sandusky, in two sessions, at the home of his lawyer, Joe Amendola. You can read the resulting story here.
Also of note are the nine-minute video clip, in which you can listen to and watch Sandusky during the interview, and a collection of 13 audio clips (under “Multimedia”) in which he addresses topics ranging from physical activity with kids to his thoughts on Joe Paterno to his life today.
Tina Hay, editor
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