An Icon Falls, and a President With Him: Penn State begins painful struggle to recover from scandal
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Fall Saturdays, when Nittany Lions fans fill up 107,000-seat Beaver Stadium, have always defined Penn State University. But after a widely publicized sex-abuse scandal shook the football program—and the university itself—to its core, Saturdays here will never be the same.
Plenty of places love to sell their virtues, but people wear their values on their sleeves here. Tradition, pride, and honor run deep in this central Pennsylvania valley. They are part of a small-town culture that teaches people to trust their neighbors and stay loyal at any cost.
This week the Penn State family drew close as it faced allegations of the most heinous kind: The children among them weren’t safe, betrayed by some of the most respected of their men.
Law-enforcement officials say at least nine young boys were sexually assaulted at the hands of a former Nittany Lions football coach over a 15-year span, while university leaders allegedly did nothing to stop it.
John S. Nichols, an emeritus professor at Penn State who chairs the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a national sports-reform group, has long praised his employer for finding balance between athletics and academic work. The athletic department here, whose motto is “Success With Honor,” has always stood out among its peers. Players graduate. Faculty oversight is strong. And in the 58 years that the NCAA has tracked major violations, Penn State has never committed a single one.
Yet three years ago, Mr. Nichols warned of the dangers for an institution that holds itself above the rest.
“Under the mantle of ‘Live by the sword, die by the sword,’” he wrote in The Patriot-News of Harrisburg,”a major athletics scandal would become far more devastating for Penn State than for some peers which have become inured with repeated scandals.”
As he sees it, the stage was set.