One year ago today, the Sandusky scandal began. One year later, here we are. I offer my thoughts on the Paterno legacy, such as it is. For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to recite the monumental (literally) good that Joe Paterno and the Paterno family have done. Rather, I’m going to speak about…
Graham Spanier, former Penn State’s former president, has begun his push-back against the Freeh Report, and against the notion that a cover up took place from within the University administration to protect Jerry Sandusky. In his extensive interview with Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker, Spanier speaks plainly. He says a “rush to judgment” has…
A short note for sharing especially within the Penn State family: Anyone who speaks about the Nittany Valley or Joe Paterno will risk being destroyed by the mob and the fever in these heady days immediately post-Freeh. Anyone who thinks even slightly differently than the consensus of enmity will be branded a cultist, deemed a Sandusky-sympathizer,…
As I sit down to write here in the early morning hours of July 12, 2012 my spirit is weary. I’m a Penn Stater, you see, and later this morning Louis Freeh will be releasing his report on his investigation into the roots of the Jerry Sandusky scandal — or as his website promises, “the…
Penn State Trustees knew about the sex-abuse allegations and grand jury investigation into Jerry Sandusky at least as early as May of last year, seven months prior to the release of the explosive grand jury report’s release, according to Penn State President Rodney Erickson: Penn State University trustees were briefed by then-President Graham Spanier about…
Over the past eight weeks, in the fallout from the public Jerry Sandusky scandal, I’ve written at length about the body I believe is most responsible for the coverup and disaster that the depredations of one man have needlessly caused to Penn Staters as an entire family. That body is Penn State’s Board of Trustees. They’ve encouraged…
After sixty years of leadership, formation, and honorable service to Penn State University and the Nittany Valley community, to say nothing of his national example, Joe Paterno was fired, dramatically — by telephone courier, without the dignity of even a conversation from the Penn State Trustees. A lifetime of service, marred at the very end…
On Nov. 5, just hours before news of the Jerry Sandusky broke, I wrote about What Joe Paterno Is, And What Joe Paterno Is Not, in which I asserted: There is no glory in sameness. … In joining the same mercenary, win-or-die attitude with which coaches are treated elsewhere, that characterize the present age with some…
In the continuing fallout from the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal at Penn State, the one entity that has basically escaped critical evaluation or any sustained sense of culpability is the University’s Board of Trustees. The following analysis, written by a friend of mine and posted to a news article last week before Joe…
Tom Shakely runs Pastoral Media Formation, a media services, content strategy, and consulting service.
