Blue White Illustrated

MOMENTOUS YEAR Students gathered for a candlelight vigil on Old Main lawn to show support for child abuse victims. Be- low, the community came together again to watch Joe Paterno's funeral procession pass through downtown State College. Far left, Bill O'Brien was named head coach in January. Annemarie Mountz Penn State as school officials await Freeh's findings later this summer. Still, it is reassuring that the universi- ty has put some practices in place to deal with the concerns that the San- dusky case has raised. Penn State has launched a program aimed at helping university employees recognize and re- port cases of suspected child abuse. Susan Cromwell of the Office of Hu- man Resources said the effort is de- signed to "move people from aware- ness of the issue toward having the confidence to take action." Those efforts go hand in hand with the creation of the Penn State Hershey Center for the Protection of Children and the partnership that the universi- ty established with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape and the Nation- al Sexual Violence Resource Center. The university spent $1.1 million to establish the Hershey center and awarded a $1.5 million grant to PCAR. The money came from the $2.6 million in Big Ten bowl revenue Penn State re- ceived. It's a start. The university also needs to follow through on its pledge to be more transparent. A lot of people are looking into its secrets now, including a num- ber of national news organizations, and they are not going to be satisfied with the official statements that ap- pear periodically on progress.psu.edu. For all the money it's spending on public relations – $2.5 million to be exact – Penn State isn't going to be able to spin its way out of this crisis. If it hopes to rebuild trust, it needs to avoid the perception that it has still more to hide. In addition, the Penn State commu- Chris Koleno town where secrets are easily hidden. How many serial pedophiles can there be in the world? And of those people, how many could go undetected for years and years? But when you start paying attention to the news stories and the police logs, you start feeling differently about the scope of the problem. You start to sus- pect that its dimensions are much big- ger than you ever imagined. In a recent essay in The New York Times Magazine, writer Amos Kamil returns to the prestigious Brooklyn private school he attended three decades earlier, reconnecting with stu- T E O N L I N E . C O M dents who say they were abused by faculty members. Kamil details inci- dents involving three teachers and de- scribes a culture of silence that al- lowed the abuse to continue. The par- allels are troubling, and indeed, Kamil acknowledges that the Sandusky scandal was one of the reasons he de- cided to investigate his classmates' charges. "I kept getting tangled in the questions everyone was getting tangled in," he wrote. "How does an institu- tional culture arise to condone, or at least ignore, something that, individu- ally, every member knows is wrong?" That question continues to haunt nity needs to be open-minded about whatever may be contained in the Freeh report and respect the legitima- cy of the process, even if the findings challenge our preconceptions about what happened. Penn State, its alumni and supporters need to fully under- stand the individual failures and orga- nizational problems that gave rise to the scandal. What's more, this infor- mation needs to be used constructively – not as ammo in a feud between Penn State-ReBOT and the board of trustees or Intercollegiate Athletics and Old Main, but as the beginning of an effort to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. Ultimately, the question for Penn State isn't whether it is going to move on from the Sandusky scandal but how and when. This is a big institu- tion, with 24 campuses, close to 100,000 students and a $1.7 billion endowment. It can multitask. While the rest of the nation was pre- occupied with the scandal, a couple of Penn State researchers discovered a potential breakthrough treatment for leukemia. Another team was busy de- veloping high-speed transistors that could someday make silicon mi- crochips look sluggish. Those accom- plishments don't in any way lessen the harm that's been done, but they do help put it in context. This is not San- dusky U. Penn Staters do, however, need to brace themselves for the reality that things are likely to get worse before they get better. The testimony of the past few weeks was only the first part of the reckoning. Freeh is next, after which the feds, the civil courts and maybe the NCAA will have their chance to weigh in. With so much of this ordeal yet to play out, Penn State will have to take advantage of opportunities to show it- self in a more flattering light. The good news for the university is that those opportunities will be plentiful. The Nit- tany Lions will be on TV most every Saturday this fall, and Bill O'Brien, a sharp, witty, Ivy League-educated guy, appears ready for his role as a highly visible public figure. During the recent Coaches Caravan, O'Brien talked about his first team meeting after taking the job. "One thing I told the players was that they should have tremendous pride in be- ing a Penn State student and being a Penn State football player," he said. "When they put the letter jacket on and walk around in their hometowns or in the State College community, they should be very proud of who they are and what this program stands for." That message resonated with players this spring. Sooner or later, the rest of the world is going to be ready to hear it, too. But Penn State can't just wait for the future to get here. It has to shape it by doing the right things now. One of those things, painful though it may be, is to talk about the past. A U G U S T 2 1 , 2 0 1 2 25

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