SARASOTA - Joe Paterno was known for running a clean football program. "Success with honor," he called it. So how could Paterno have what Pennsylvania's State Police Commissioner called a lapse of “moral responsibility” when it came to the case that cost him his job?
At 84 years old, Paterno does not remember president Warren G. Harding, who served in the early 1920s. Harding once said that if he saw ten problems on the horizon heading his way, he would do nothing. By the time they got to him, he believed, nine of those problems would have gone away on their own.
Maybe that's what Paterno wished for here.
Paterno's 46 year tenure as Penn State's head football coach ended with a phone call. But Paterno sowed the seeds of his demise nine years ago. When a graduate assistant coach told him that he had seen Paterno's former top assistant Jerry Sandusky molest a young boy in a campus locker room shower, Paterno notified his boss but never called police.
“How could somebody or a group of people essentially ignore that and hope that it would go away,” asks New College political science professor Frank Alcock. “A 10-year-old was raped.”
History and politics offer numerous examples of how trying to keep something quiet causes more trouble than it saves, Alcock says. Watergate began as a simple break-in. Its cover-up cost Richard Nixon the presidency.
“Even if they think they're doing it to protect the institution it's almost like ignoring a wound or a cancer,” Alcock says. “It's going to come out eventually and you're going to make it worse by trying to hide it, so we see a lot of parallels throughout society.”
The parallels usually involve people in positions of power in insular organizations, who may fear that the revelation of wrongdoing will affect their privileges.
“If they came forward with these allegations and went to the media and the police and so forth,” says Richard Borghesi, a finance professor at USF Sarasota-Manatee who studies the business of sports, “This tight inner circle that everybody wants to be a part of would be ripped apart.”
Big time college programs, he says, become so powerful at places like Penn State that their coaches become icons who answer to no one.
“They view themselves as being incredibly important because everybody at the university puts them up on this giant pedestal,” says Borghesi.
Some have drawn a parallel between the child sex scandals at Penn State and the Catholic Church, which knew it had abusive priests, but did not report them to police.
“There's the temptation there when something happens and you're informed that maybe if I don't deal with this, it'll just go away,” says Alcock.
And Warren Harding? Who didn't act when he faced problems?
He died two-and-a-half years into his presidency, with his administration embroiled in scandal and corruption.
