Donald's Blog
 |
|
This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
|
|
|
In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
|
July 31, 2012Penn State's closed society
Long ago and far away, I worked for a couple of years in a minor civilian capacity for the Police Federation of England and Wales. It was there I learned about closed societies.
The British police service was a public whipping boy in the early 1980s. For example, the cops had the responsibility of picking up a drunk and putting him in a cell overnight; they did not have the manpower or the expertise to practice medicine, and if the individual died, that was a "death in police custody", as though the coppers were in the business of beating drunks to death. I had to read all the papers and clip out anything to do with the police, so I learned a lot about this stuff.
I never met a British cop I didn't like. But there could be no doubt that the police service was a (mostly male) closed society. In any police service anywhere in the world, you have to do something egregiously brutal or criminal to get kicked out; if you are merely a bad-tempered bully boy that the public despises, your mates will close ranks around you and you'll have a job for life.
It's the same for teachers, doctors, lawyers and football coaches. Incompetent or troublesome teachers in New York City famously report to a "rubber room" for an indeterminate time where they sit and do nothing (and get paid) while the authorities decide what if anything to do with them. There was an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal titled "Teachers Unions Go to Bat for Sexual Predators". The article is loaded with an anti-union bias, starting with its title, but nowadays one has to agree with one's right-wing friends that the teachers' unions have too much power. Campbell Brown, the reporter writing in the Journal, says that "In the last five years in New York City, 97 tenured teachers or school employees have been charged by the Department of Education with sexual misconduct." She does not say how many if any were dismissed, but gives several anecdotes about teachers who were found guilty by arbitrators of inappropriate touching, suggestive sexual banter, one asking a student "to give him a strip-tease", and so on, and were not dismissed, but suspended and/or fined. The local teachers unions and the school district together choose the arbitrators, who can earn up to $1,400 a day. This is a closed society at work, closing ranks to protect its own, and Brown quotes teachers who don't like it. There is legislation pending in Albany to suspend the binding nature of the arbitration and put the school district back in charge.
Cops, teachers, and doctors are necessary, and even lawyers I suppose. Football coaches are not.
Here in the Lehigh Valley we have been hearing and reading for months about a scandal at Penn State. A football coach saw another football coach "horsing around" with a ten-year-old boy in the shower. No doubt he didn't want to believe his eyes. The child was perhaps being penetrated; we don't know, but it was that kind of horseplay. Instead of stopping it or calling the cops, the coach waited until the next day to tell head coach Joe Paterno about it. Paterno reported it to somebody or other, and nothing happened. Now, about ten years later, the child molester Jerry Sandusky is in prison, found guilty of a great many charges, having been allowed to continue running a childrens' charity all this time, and the explosion of the scandal has engulfed the university. All this is about a closed society averting its eyes, and I am damned tired of reading about it.
Paterno and the university's president were fired a few months ago, and Paterno soon died of lung cancer. He was the "winningest" coach in collegiate football, and he and the university saw to it that the football players maintained academic standards: they were not moronic beefcakes hired with phony scholarships to trample opposing teams; they not only won games but got good degrees from a first-rate university. Paterno was a god, to the point that a janitor who knew what was going on in the showers was afraid to blow the whistle because he knew it would cost him his job. And if Paterno was a god, he could have nipped the scandal in the bud many years ago, but he was a god that failed. Imagine a statue erected to a man who was still alive: the ridiculous statue of Paterno on the campus has now been removed.
But wait. That's not the end of the story. The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) is punishing Penn State. The school will not be allowed to play bowl games for a while, and so on. But even more bizarrely, the school will be fined $60 million, which is said to be what football brings in each year, and all its wins for the last ten years are to be "vacated". I would not walk across the street to see a football game, but a lot of people buy tickets to games, and the technology being what it is today, I have to subscribe to cable if I want to watch TV, and some of my money goes to support sports channels whether I like it or not. Are all the football fans child molesters? Why should their money be confiscated? And the young men who played on all the teams that won a hell of a lot of games in the last ten years, are they all child molesters?
No doubt Penn State will have learned a lesson from all this, but it has not learned the ultimate lesson. A great university would now say goodbye to the NCAA. "We don't want to belong to your good-old-boy network anymore. We're not going to pay you sixty million dollars, we don't need your permission to offer football scholarships, and we will not allow won games to be unwon. Our teams will play anybody who wants to compete with us, but we don't mind if we just have to play each other for a while, and we don't care if our games are not televised. We are going to give the games back to the kids."