Blue White Illustrated

towns or in the cubicle down the hall from yours. By now, just about every Penn Stater probably has a story about being mocked or condemned for showing allegiance to university that has been making ghastly headlines for the past 16 months. It���s easy to feel defensive under those circumstances, and it���s understandable that some would find even more solace than usual in events like THON or the recent Pink Zone women���s basketball game, which raised as much as $250,000 for breast cancer research. These events reinforce the university���s idea of itself as a place where all people ��� students, faculty, administrators, coaches, athletes ��� are committed to the betterment of the community. About one-third of the student body participates in THON every year, and more than 14,000 people attended the Pink Zone game. That���s a pretty healthy fraction of the general population, and it helps to explain the exasperation Penn Staters feel now that the Sandusky scandal has come to represent the university���s ���culture��� to the outside world. Some would say there���s something unseemly about all that defensiveness. And there is something unseemly about the vitriol with which Penn State���s lunatic fringe has gone after those on its enemies list. But every community has a few nutters, and Penn State���s were incited in part by the very institution that was supposed to be closing the book on this whole sorry episode: the NCAA. When president Mark Emmert took the stage in Indianapolis last July, he didn���t simply condemn the individuals at the university who mishandled the allegations against Jerry Sandusky. He took issue with Penn State as a whole, citing ���broad-based failures of integrity��� and denouncing its culture of ���hero worship.��� He also applied the NCAA���s boilerplate enforcement vocabulary ��� particularly its emphasis on academic propriety ��� to a case that was unlike anything that had ever come before it previously. ���The fundamental message here, the gut check message is, do we have the right balance in our culture? Do we have, first and foremost, the academic values of integrity and honesty and responsibility as the drivers of our university, or are we in a position where hero worship and winning at all costs has subordinated those core values?��� he said. ���If that���s the case, then you need to address that, and you need to address that as quickly as you can. That���s the lesson here. I hope that���s what we see.��� A quick glance at the Nittany Lions��� graduation statistics ��� they had a program-record 91 percent Graduation Success Rate in the most recent survey ��� would have invalidated the contention that Penn State had forsaken its academic values. But at the time, it didn���t seem like a miscalculation. The entire country was screaming for justice, and if Emmert wanted to pile on, so what? The school had it coming. But now the NCAA is in a more difficult spot. It bungled the Miami investigation so badly that it ended up having to throw out evidence it obtained by breaking its own rules. It managed to make the Hurricanes, whose rap sheet is as lengthy and colorful as any in college football history, look like innocent victims. It even got lectured by UM president Donna Shalala for ���unprofessional and unethical behavior��� ��� hardly the outcome anyone expected when the world first learned that a convicted Ponzi scheme mastermind had allegedly been entertaining Hurricanes athletes on his yacht. Did anyone see this coming? Not in Indianapolis apparently. When questioned last July about the NCAA���s decision to bypass its usual enforcement process in the Penn State case, Emmert expressed satisfaction with the way everything played out. ���I feel very good about our enforcement process,��� he said, ���and especially the changes that are under way in that process right now.��� If the Miami case is any indication, those changes haven���t been for the better. While two cases may not constitute a pattern of regulatory overreach, especially given the many instances in which the NCAA has under-reacted to potential violations, they do raise concerns that the organization doesn���t really have a judicial process and is instead dispensing justice arbitrarily. How might Penn State���s case have been adjudicated differently? Imagine that the sanctions had included an opportunity for ���parole��� that would have, for instance, allowed the bowl ban to be reduced by a year and returned a few of those lost scholarships on the condition that the university meet the benchmarks laid out in the Freeh report. Such a provision would have served as an acknowledgment that the NCAA ignored its usual disciplinary procedures, didn���t wait for the legal process to run its course, coerced Penn State into signing a consent decree and may even have overstepped its jurisdiction. At the same time, it would have left intact an array of harsh penalties that would likely have satisfied the public���s desire for serious and immediate action. But the NCAA didn���t do that. It took a hard line last summer, and while it got its consent decree, which prevents Penn State from challenging the sanctions, it now finds itself fighting a two-front battle against a much more litigious opponent: the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. First, there���s Gov. Tom Corbett���s federal lawsuit challenging the sanctions on antitrust grounds. Corbett has argued that the NCAA���s ruling ���punished past, present and future students, student-athletes, local residents and citizens of Pennsylvania.��� The sanctions contributed to a decline of nearly 5,000 fans per game last fall, and that definitely wasn���t good for business. But if all future NCAA sanctions must be devised so as to avoid collateral damage, no one will ever be punished for anything. Legal experts seem to think Corbett���s suit is a long shot, and political experts say it���s a campaign stunt. There���s a good chance they���re both right. More interesting are the commonwealth���s efforts to ensure that Penn State���s $60 million fine is spent entirely in Pennsylvania. State Sen. Jake Corman has argued that by dis-

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