Blue White Illustrated

Criticism of Penn State's academic culture misses mark T he most egregious fraud of the defective Freeh Report and the subsequent unprecedented NCAA and Big Ten sanctions continues to be the assertion that the "culture of football" at Penn State corrupted the university's academics and the morality of its leaders. Aside from the fact that there is no definitive proof that four of Penn State's leaders covered up the secret and appalling behavior of a serial child sex abuser to protect the foot- ball program, the final determination of their collective or individual guilt still awaits the end of the judicial process. However, there is absolutely no truth that academics were perverted by the so-called culture of football. On the contrary, the opposite is true and has been for decades. And Louie Freeh and Mark Emmert and their cohorts as well as their enablers on the Penn State board of trustees know it. In January 2004, Emmert's prede- cessor as president of the NCAA, the late Myles Brand, cited Penn State as the collegiate model for combining academics and athletics. At the con- clusion of an extensive two-day on- campus visit, during which he met with administrative, athletic and fac- ulty personnel, as well as student- athletes, Brand stated: "Penn State is the poster child for doing it right in college sports." What's significant about the timing of Brand's praise is that it came more than 10 years after the NCAA began pressuring all member institutions to improve their academics or face seri- ous penalties. The catalyst was a new annual report on the graduation rates of student-athletes based on a federally mandated requirement uti- lizing data from the U.S. Department of Education. It started with the freshman class entering college in the fall of 1984 and tracked their progress during a six-year period. Since that initial report was pub- lished in 1990, the graduation rate of Penn State's student-athletes has been among the highest in the coun- try, far exceeding that of most other Division I and I-A schools and public universities and on par with the grad- uation rates of Penn State's entire student body. The first-year gradua- tion rate of 60 percent was an anom- aly for Penn State. Six years later, the rate had climbed steadily to 83 per- cent, and since 2000 it has fluctuated between the high 70s and low 80s. Under Brand's leadership, the NCAA went on to introduce another, more accurate, graduation measuring stick in 2005-06: the Graduation Success Rate, or GSR, which incorpo- rates the graduation rates of individ- ual teams. Unlike the methodology used by the federal report, the GSR also includes incoming transfers who graduate and eliminates student-ath- letes who left school without graduat- ing but who were academically eligi- ble at the time of their departure. Once again, the GSR for Penn State student-athletes has been among the best in the nation, hovering in the high 80s and topping most public schools and the Big Ten. In keeping with the late Joe Pater- no's well-known emphasis on aca- demics, the football team's GSR in eight years of reporting has been consistently in the mid-80s, falling below 80 only twice and setting a record of 91 percent in the latest GSR for 2011-12. Just last Decem- ber, the football team's GSR of 87 percent put it in a fourth-place tie with Stanford among all the teams playing in postseason bowl games. It's not a coincidence that the high- er graduation rates for Penn State's athletes – as well as the entire stu- dent body – came after Paterno chal- lenged the university's board of trustees in 1983 to dramatically im- prove Penn State's academics. In a speech to the board a month after his 1982 team won Penn State's first na- tional championship in football, Pa- terno pleaded for an all-out commit- ment to academics, starting with a $7 million to $10 million fundraising campaign by the fall of 1983. "It bothers me to see Penn State football be No. 1 and then to pick up a newspaper several weeks later and we find we don't have many of our disciplines that rated up there with the other institutions in the country," Paterno told the board. " I think we have got to start right now to put our energies together to make Penn State not only No. 1 [in football], but I think we've got to start to put our en- ergies together to make this a No. 1 institution by 1990." That Paterno's challenge succeeded beyond expectations is an estab- lished fact. With the help of millions of dollars raised by multiple fundraising drives, Penn State has developed into a world-class universi- ty with an enviable academic cur- riculum, faculty and facilities as dozens of well-publicized studies and reports have shown. One of those facilities is the Morgan Academic Support Center for Stu- dent-Athletes. It was formed in 1986 and has since grown to the point that it now has 18 full-time staff members including two academic counselors and a learning specialist assigned specifically to football, and two part- time staffers. The Morgan Center has been one of Penn State's crown jew- els in academics for student-athletes

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