166. Changing the Culture at Penn State

How do you change a culture?  Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, thinks you can do it by hurting people who are part of that culture. 

Was there "a culture of reverence for the football program" at Penn State?  Yes.  The NCAA executive committee's findings (or rather the findings of Louis Freeh, which Emmert and his committee followed) showed that it was "ingrained at all levels of the campus community." 

So the NCAA kept the football team out of bowl games for four years, reduced the number of scholarships that could be granted its players, turned 111 of its victories into losses, and fined the school 60 million dollars.  That hurts the students, the alumni, the fans, the players, the coaches, and, thinking of that 60 million, the professors, the librarians, the administrators, and anybody who has a stake in Penn State's reputation in any enterprise that requires money.  All of them.

This action has been subject to some very sharp criticism.  Gary Alan Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, has compared the changing of wins to losses in the record book to the rewriting of history by the communists in Orwell's 1984.  Twenty-nine past chairs of the Penn State Faculty Senate have objected that the Freeh statement about the culture is plain false: not one of them had ever "been asked to change grades for athletes or approve of phantom courses or majors."

Those are big issues but next to culture-change they're small.  Culture-change is beginning to look like the great challenge of the 21st century.  Isn't it what we're trying to do in the Middle East?  Isn't it what Thomas Friedman and so many other editorialists wanted us to do in Iraq?  Now here's Emmert, having a go at Penn State.

And as an old culture-changer — that is, as a teacher, a supplier the arts and sciences to the undersupplied — I have to say that he has the wrong end of the stick.  You don't change culture by hurting people.  Hurting is what you do to change behavior.  You know, the way armies and police forces do.  To change culture you talk, point, sing, dance, and hold up for admiration — the way artists and profs do. 

We profs mainly talk and point.  And we have no doubt we can change a culture.  We do it all the time.  Small-town culture, fundamentalist religious culture, xenophobic Midwest culture, redneck Appalachian culture, he-man culture, more cultures than you can shake a stick at, they all send their products into our classrooms.  There's a lot of resistance there sometimes, but we're eager to, we've got to, overcome it.  Change the fundamentalist culture and you can teach evolution, change the he-man culture and you can teach poetry.  We get right at it (it's slow work) and after a while we have what we need, students assimilated into the academic culture. 

"If you're saying that that is what Emmert ought to be doing I think you have missed something.  He may be a prof but he has taken a policeman's job.  He presides over an organization that's supposed to check for violation of rules and punish violators — that is, hurt them.  That's what he's doing." 

In which case I think you've exposed the real problem here: confusion.  Emmert is trying to use his police powers to do a prof's (or a priest's, or a parent's) job.  Doesn't he see that powers, starting with the big ones named in our Constitution, should be separate?  that Americans are surprised and offended when they are not?  Look at that report he relies on.  Freeh finds "a striking lack of empathy" for the victims.  What's a judge doing talking about empathy?  That's child-psychologist talk.  Parent talk.  "I'll handle the feelings," says the mother. "You law people just tell me what he did."

That's being offended.  Here's being surprised.  The infractions committee of Emmert's own organization didn't take up the Penn State case.  The reason?  According to some former members, "because it involved a cover-up of criminal activity rather than a violation of traditional NCAA bylaws."  It wasn't in their domain.  But (surprise!) there was Emmert, imposing penalties.

By now I think we all have a pretty good idea of the division of labor.  Architects design, builders build, realtors sell.  In America that gets an early boost in our schooling, when we learn about the organization of our government.  We each play our part and avoid playing somebody else's part and we get the benefits of an ordered society.

"Ah," says my friend, "but underneath this division we are all human beings, and that's what Emmert and Freeh, when they look at what was done to those children, can't resist being.  You want to keep them in their compartments, rational and cold.  I prefer having them out as caring, feeling human beings.  I join Emmert and Freeh."

I do too.  In my heart.  What heart can resist the call to do something, to protect childhood innocence and goodness from adult evil?  But my mind holds me back.  It consults adult experience and says, "Calculate the risks."  Here the evil is a culture and what's done to it is a hurtful act against individuals, justified by the fact of evil.  But "evil," like the on-the-spot word, "bad," is not a fact word; it's a judgment word, and subjective.  Use it to justify a hurtful action and there's no place to stop.  If you're not hurting ghetto-dwellers and Roma and Inuit and anybody else whose culture you judge to be "bad" you're helpless before those who do.

How different from punishing people for their behavior.  Before you can do that you have meet all kinds of conditions, set up, usually by governments, for their protection.  Definition of the crime, rules of evidence, guarantees of process.  You can probably find most of these conditions in the books that both Freeh and Emmert have, up to this point, had to follow.  Punish them for their culture, though, and where are the books you follow?

So there's the first risk, making yourself the tolerator, if not the companion, of bigots and kooks, high-handed culture-punishers.  The second risk is that you'll make an intolerable mess.  If you sweep aside all distinctions between assigned jobs what happens to our ordered society?  What happens to order itself, to reason?  Reason says, "Keep things straight."  Humane feelings say, "Make things good."  Follow the latter at the expense of the former and you're going to wind with everything crooked, a mess.

"So, do you say to Mark Emmert. 'Do nothing'?  'Look at an attack on innocence and goodness and do nothing'?  You, my friend, are concerned about risk, and say that punishment for bad culture risks the loss of reason.  I say that failure to punish risks the triumph of evil.  Edmund Burke said, 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.'"

Yes I do say to Emmert, "Do nothing" — though I'd put it as, "Mind your own business."  Looking at Iraq, and now Syria, I have to say that.  And I'd like to add this to Burke: "All that is necessary to make a mess (in international affairs called a 'quagmire') is for good people, every time they see evil, to think they have to do something."