Monday, Dec. 12, 2011 Penn State Of Mind By Sean Gregory with Kayla Webley

In the days following the revelations of the sex scandal at Penn State, the horrific details of a football coach's alleged rape of young boys were difficult to believe. The community's response bordered on incomprehensible: students rioting in defense of Joe Paterno, the revered football giant who lost his job as head coach for failing to do more to stop the abuse; alums at a tailgate party, arguing that Paterno's indifference was no big deal and chanting, "You gotta fight/ For your right/ For JoePa!" to the tune of the Beastie Boys classic; the funeral-home director, escorting a grieving man from the room where he had just identified his deceased mother, saying, "Don't you think there has been a rush to judgment on Joe Paterno?"

"From the outside looking in, you can't understand it," says Andrew Hanselman, a senior majoring in marketing, on the close-knit Penn State culture. "From the inside looking out, you can't explain it."

But as more and more campuses confront the cost of an insular culture, the need to understand--and take action--will only grow. In another college-sports capital, Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine was fired Nov. 27 after being accused of molesting at least three boys during his 36-year career.

In places like Syracuse, N.Y.; State College, Pa.; and Columbus, Ohio, college sports are now too-big-to-fail economies, and this has implications for everything from the safety of students to the mission of the universities. "Some campuses have a misguided perspective," says Brett Sokolow, a managing partner at the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, "that covering these things up will help them in the long term." But if there is a lesson being learned in State College, it is not just danger that comes in the cover-up; it is the risk you face from what you can't see in the first place.

The Happy Valley Bubble

Penn State sees itself as a place that breeds an intense, familial sense of loyalty. It's partly the university's setting--nestled in Happy Valley, the third safest metropolitan area in the U.S., in a town Psychology Today once called one of the least stressful places to live in America. People tend to show up as students and stay forever, in spirit if not in fact. "Even when you leave State College," says Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sport science who arrived on campus in 1984, "it's attached to you like an umbilical cord." The Penn State Alumni Association, with more than 165,000 members, is the largest dues-paying alumni group in the world. Most senior athletic-department officials are Penn State grads who have worked at the school for decades.

And why would they leave a place where football is cause for epic celebrations that draw more than 100,000 people on Saturdays to the second largest stadium in the western hemisphere, where players are kings and coaches are gods, and none more so than Paterno, presiding for more than 45 years over a $72.7 million empire, the fifth richest among college programs? Penn State football made a $53.2 million profit last year, second only to the University of Texas' $71.2 million. Paterno earned millions from Penn State; he and his wife donated more than $4 million to the school.

With his philanthropy came great power. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Paterno thwarted the efforts of Vicky Triponey, the school's former standards-and-conduct officer, to discipline football players for, among other transgressions, beating up other students. Paterno even threatened to stop fundraising if she was not fired. Triponey resigned in 2007. "It's no secret that Penn State football acted unfettered," says Donald Heller, an education professor at Penn State, "and without institutional control."

Matt Paknis, like Paterno an alumni of Brown University, was a graduate assistant coach for Penn State in the late 1980s. "I always scratched my head about that place," says Paknis, now a leadership-development consultant living in Massachusetts. "You had to fit into the approval system that was out there. There wasn't a lot of challenging, saying, 'What's going on here?'"

Paknis, maybe because of his low status, was never welcomed into the inner circle, he says. "There was this projection outside of Penn State that he was the dean, this nice old guy," he says of Paterno. "That's the furthest thing from the truth. He ruled with an iron fist." In that environment, Paknis believes, Penn State would be loath to look too closely at the accusations swirling around former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, for fear of damaging the brand. But other Penn State veterans strongly dispute that self-protection played a role. "There was never a reluctance for Joe to involve people in deep thinking, to tap into creative minds," says Craig Cirbus, an assistant coach for Paterno from 1984 to '94 who became head coach at the University at Buffalo. "He wanted all different views provided." And Paterno's defenders have argued all along that had he and other coaches and administrators understood the extent of Sandusky's alleged crimes, they would have intervened more aggressively. So what is it they weren't able to see?

The Psychology of Protection

Within a college bubble, say organizational psychologists, the urge to shape your mental picture of the world can be overwhelming. "Culture trumps everything," says Laura Finfer, a psychologist and a principal at a New York City executive consulting firm. Colleges, Finfer has found, can be quite clannish: "Cultures define you, and you become blind to everything in front of your eyes."

Or the way you see things changes. Ray Aldag, a management professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Business, points to two cognitive tricks: selective perception and subjective perception. Selective perception is our bias toward ignoring information that is at odds with our worldview. Subjective perception explains our tendency to couple uncomfortable information with reaffirming facts in order to make ourselves feel better. For example, Penn Staters decry abuse. But pair that with anger over the indignity of Paterno's dismissal, and Paterno becomes a victim.

Cohesive groups like the Penn State football leadership tend to draw boundaries around themselves. "We apply rules of fair and just behavior to our own groups and people within them," says Michelle Duffy, an organizational-behavior professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "But we morally exclude outsiders. In some ways you are dehumanizing out-group members--in this case, the victims."

That dynamic helps explain the problems that can come from campuses that act like city-states, with law-enforcement systems operating independently of local and federal officials. Many campuses have their own police departments, staffed with sworn officers who have the authority to investigate everything from break-ins to murders. Depending on the transgression and how it is reported, some alleged crimes are dealt with on campus, and some are passed to local prosecutors. The colleges have unusual discretion, although stronger enforcement of federal laws is affording them less latitude. The Clery Act, signed into law in 1990, requires colleges and universities that receive federal funds to disclose the number of criminal offenses recorded on campus. Until recently, however, the Clery Act has lacked teeth.

Less-than-transparent reporting of campus crime is a problem beyond Penn State, especially when athletes are involved. So the Obama Administration has created a team dedicated to strengthening enforcement. In early October, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation of Marquette University after two female students accused athletes of sexual misconduct. The university has been accused by a local prosecutor of failing to report the allegation to Milwaukee police as mandated by Wisconsin law. This year, six institutions are facing fines. That's the same number of schools that the Department of Education fined in the first 18 years of the law's existence. Now 49 schools have been investigated, 26 of them in the past three years. Six-figure fines are the new norm. "We're just beginning to break the silence of sexual violence that exists on campuses," says Alison Kiss, the executive director of Security on Campus, a college safety-advocacy group.

The Grand Experiment Revisited

During his 45-plus years as head football coach, Paterno conducted what he termed "the grand experiment": the idea that major-college athletes could contend for national championships while excelling in the classroom. For the most part, it succeeded. Out of this current painful event, Penn State has a chance to try a new grand experiment. The school could drop football for at least a year.

Such a decision would not be unprecedented. In 1939, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, scornful of schools that drew too much attention for their sports teams, ditched football. "We Americans are the only people in human history who ever got sport mixed up with higher education," Hutchins wrote in a 1954 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED article explaining his decision and advocating that others follow suit.

Through the Penn State example, schools across the U.S. would be forced to think about rebalancing academics and athletics. Nearly a third of the players on the Texas Tech football team don't graduate. But in the Big 12 conference, Texas Tech is actually the top academic performer. Among 65 schools with major-college-football programs, only three--Northwestern, Boston College and Duke--graduate 90% or more of their football players. According to Duke University economist Charles Clotfelter, salaries for football coaches at 44 major public universities have grown 750%, on an inflation-adjusted basis, since 1985. Salaries for professors at these schools have risen 32%.

Six months ago, Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel resigned under pressure after trying to cover up NCAA violations. It was a chance for Ohio State president Gordon Gee, who once abolished the athletics department at Vanderbilt University to better integrate sports with that school, to reset the terms on his campus. But on Nov. 28, he announced the hiring of Urban Meyer as football coach, with one of the richest contracts in college-sports history--$24 million plus a country-club membership and a private plane for personal use. The campus bubble keeps inflating; is Penn State, or anyone else, going to pop it?