September 20, 2016

Everything you need to know about college occurred in State College, Pennsylvania, over the last few days.  And it starts, of course, with the football field where Penn State decided to honor Joe Paterno's 50th anniversary for taking the Nittany Lions' head coaching job.

I am not even going to insult anyone's intelligence by reviewing the details of Paterno's sad ending at Penn State.  If you have been living under that kind of a rock and are now emerging to read this blog, you have bigger concerns.

Anyway, here's what this event, and its ancillary effects, epitomize about college today. Let's look at it through a football lens: we have four downs, can we advance the mission of colleges and universities?

First Down:  Athletics, especially football, is still king.  No one demands a revisionist history of a beloved faculty member or even administrator (some of us end up beloved, right?) in the way that they demand that history for a beloved coach.  Just this week a Dean of Business in Syracuse was fired for soliciting a prostitute.  In the overall scope of things, a fairly minor transgression, and one could argue a victimless crime, but this poor Dean will never get the support to be honored in the way that a football coach, who clearly never acted upon an assistant coach's predatory sexual advances on young boys, was. 

Second Down (and long): It is bad enough that football drives a university's image, but as Inside Higher Education pointed out in a story yesterday, many colleges and universities now sell beer at their football games, in part to boost sagging attendance.  Penn State is cited in this article as considering selling beer for its general admissions' seating.  At a time when alcohol is frequently the common factor in sexual assault cases, hazing incidents, binge drinking and student mental health issues, it is a moral outrage to be selling beer at games being played by, and in small proportion, attended by people who can't legally drink it yet.  I have to admit my own alma mater, West Virginia University, embarrasses me when it says, through its Chief of Police, beer sales are "a part of an overall strategy for improving safety in our stadium.”

Third Down (and a country mile): So, let's go back to idyllic State College.  Not counting the stragglers who refuse to graduate in four years, the current undergraduate students were never on campus when Paterno coached a football game and weren't even born when the Nittany Lions last won a national championship under Paterno, facts that didn't escape Penn State's student newspaper's opinions' editor, Lauren Davis. In her well-reasoned, non-inflammatory critique of the college's honor for JoePa, she states "Currently, the only associations these classes of students have with Paterno is reading and hearing his name tied with Jerry Sandusky's and lawsuits or coming from the mouths of Penn State alumni who can’t accept that their time here is no longer." Alumni and boosters have more power on your average college campus than the students.

Fourth Down (Might as well punt): Does Ms. Davis need a "safe space" to express such opinions?  God forbid a college from deciding that it needs to ensure students can safely and openly express opinions that may be contrary to the majority.  Well, at Penn State these days, her opinions are clearly in the minority.  And she has faced incredible backlash about them. Penn State professors, you know, the people routinely mocked for being isolated in their ivory towers, have come out to support Davis through all of the "retaliation [that serves as] pernicious cover for the spread of misogyny and sexual violence on a campus where these are already of grave concern."

In the debate about safe places and political correctness, it is so easy to deflect the criticisms, to claim that a university has merely turned the tables on discrimination, usually toward males, often white males. if you want to be especially delusional, you can argue that women have too many rights on a college campus, as a young lady, junior at Barnard College, characterized, for The College Fix commented:  "the feminist movement has been so successful that it is young male students, and not young women, who lose out."  She defiantly states "the modern college is a man's world no longer." Ultimately, she bemoans that hostility, contempt, and scorn for men is inherent not just on campus, but throughout our general culture."  Her primary argument is that women make up the majority of students on a college campus and react vehemently against a "phantom patriarchy" that causes men's rights to be limited.

Tell that to Lauren Davis at Penn State.

Franco Harris, tarring his legacy as a Steeler in many fans' eyes, said about this event to honor Paterno: “In one way or another, Joe Paterno had an impact on all of our lives . . . “As I lay down this brick, it is a testament to the culture that Joe laid down for us.”  What culture are you praising, Franco?

Here's the thing.  Joe would have punted too after seeing this accumulation of negative yardage. If he was half the man the Penn State folks say he was, and on a good day, I am willing to admit that he did a lot of good things and made one really regrettable error in refusing to acknowledge the Sandusky situation, he would have been appalled at the focus on athletics over academics, on the selling of alcohol at football games, at the inability of the minority to be heard over the majority, over the brutish, hateful responses that can be directed at a college newspaper's opinions editor.

I am not entirely hopeless about the current state of higher education.  Those folks at Temple have restored some of my faith in the humanities.