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going through campus, at an added cost of $9.6 million. Around the time the pipeline was being rerouted, the university was also dealing with the fallout from a new insurance plan in which employees were to be fined $100 per month if they failed to complete a health questionnaire operated by a private website. One of the questions required that female employees disclose whether they planned on trying to get pregnant in the coming year. That idea made the downtown gas pipe look like a stroke of genius, and the university was forced to rescind the penalty and instead offer $100 incentives for employees to take part in the questionnaire. A lot of people have been talking these past few years about Penn State's "culture," about how it's profoundly flawed, how it's plumbed depths previously unexplored in academia, or anywhere else for that matter. Alumni, students, administrators, faculty and fans have all pushed back against that notion, arguing that the charges are unfair. But the truth is that Penn State does have its share of cultural problems. It's just that they're the same cultural problems that most bureaucracies have, the most notable being a top-down management style in which big decisions are made by small groups of people with little or no input from those most affected. Penn State is a sprawling institution whose power is magnified by the fact that it happens to be located in a small town. It's accustomed to getting its way, and sometimes its power blinds it to potential criticism or seduces its leaders into believing that any resistance can and will be overcome. What does any of this have to do with sports? As far as the general public is concerned, not much – and that's the point. The view from the outside is that Penn State's problems are the result of too much input, not too little. It's a view that the NCAA helped to perpetuate when it levied its sanctions against the athletic department and one that may or may not fade away now that the governing body of college athletics has backtracked in a major way. When NCAA president Mark Emmert announced the sanctions in July 2012, he decried what he called "broad-based failures of integrity" and insisted that Penn State needed to re-establish "the academic values of integrity and honesty and responsibility" as the driving forces behind its athletic programs. The shot at the university's academic values provoked fierce and immediate pushback. At the Rise and Rally event that former lettermen organized at the Lasch Building following the NCAA's announcement, one of the biggest complaints I heard from fans was that Emmert had bashed Penn State for what had been a point of pride: the university's commitment to the Grand Experiment. This was a school that graduated 91 percent of its football players in last year's NCAA survey, 23 points above the national average. Whatever its other failures, it was (and still is) among the best schools in the country at ensuring that players leave with a diploma. But in the 14 months since the NCAA bypassed its normal investigative process in order to get Penn State to sign a consent decree, the charge that the school's failures were "broad-based" hasn't held up so well, either. When outgoing Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly indicted Graham Spanier and filed new charges against Tim Curley and Gary Schultz last November, she described the allegations against the three former university officials as "a conspiracy of silence." Their trials have yet to take place, and the outcome of those proceedings will no doubt shape the way people think about the Sandusky scandal in the years to come. But the NCAA's penalties – the massive scholarship reductions, the fouryear postseason ban, the $60 million fine and the forfeiture of 112 victories – were predicated on the idea that Penn State's entire culture had been corrupted and needed to be remade from the ground up. That was the justification for its "corrective and punitive" punishments. The NCAA was going to destroy the village in order to save it. The problem with that approach is that it misjudged the university's culture. Prior to the Sandusky scandal, Penn State was one of only four major universities that had never committed a significant NCAA infraction, and for decades it had been one of the annual leaders in national graduation-rate surveys. In reducing the sanctions, the NCAA pointed to Penn State's cooperation with independent athletics monitor George Mitchell and its quick implementation of nearly all of the 119 recommendations in the Freeh report. The compliments were certainly welcome, but they raised a question: What did everyone expect? Given the school's compliance record, it would have been much more surprising if Penn State hadn't fulfilled the requirements of the consent decree. The other problem with the NCAA's approach is that it targeted all the wrong people. If this really was a conspiracy of silence as the attorney general claimed, the people who were being punished were the ones who were deliberately shielded from any knowledge of Jerry Sandusky's crimes. These people didn't give tacit support to the actions (or inactions) that created this tragic mess. They couldn't do anything about the allegations against Sandusky because they didn't know about them. In many cases, they weren't employed or enrolled at the university when the scandal erupted. Maybe with the recent decision to lessen the Nittany Lions' football sanctions, the public will begin to think differently about the cultural problems at the university. Maybe people will begin to put the blame for the Sandusky scandal on individuals – some of whom have not yet had their day in court – and stop condemning an entire community for supposedly valuing football victories above all else. Or maybe it's too late for that. Opinions seem to be made out of quick-hardening cement these days, and in Penn State's case, those opinions were shaped by a national media onslaught that attempted to widen the circle of guilt to include all of Centre County and beyond. The most irksome example was Sports Illustrated's infamous "collective

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