Down In The Valley V: Spaniers Culture of Secrecy And Penn States Other Ignored Child Sexual Abuse Scandal
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/07/2...tes-other-ignored-child-sexual-abuse-scandal/
.........What could then cause this breach of faith among the best and brightest in American academe? Historian Theodore White observed that All endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, contain within themselves the seeds of their own corruption. Here, the seeds of corruption corroding the Penn State football program and the university itself, may have been planted just one year before the infamous Sandusky assault by another allegation of sexual abuse against a PSU educator.......
Paul McLaughlin, 45, claimed that he had been sexually abused by a prominent PSU professor and two of the profs friends. In the call, he pointedly told Spanier that he had a taped confession from the professor. The PSU president wouldnt hear it didnt even want to acknowledge it. He told me whatever I wanted to get from the school, I wasnt going to get it, and this was a guy with an impeccable reputation, and unless he was convicted of a crime, they werent interested, McLaughlin said. Spanier told McLaughlin not to bother sending the tape. McLaughlin sent him the tape anyway........
According to McLaughlin, Neisworth incriminated himself on an audio tape in which the professor allegedly admitted to serving the youth alcohol and engaging in sexual activities. Cecil County, Maryland authorities transcribed the tape and brought charges against Neisworth. Those criminal charges were ultimately dismissed after the tape was deemed inadmissible, but McLaughlin claims he sued Neisworth in civil court and was offered a six-figure confidential settlement to resolve the matter. He accepted the offer........
The disregard for the veracity of McLaughlins complaint is bad enough, and the refusal to even hear the alleged taped confession is mind-boggling, but perhaps most incredible is Monks analysis of the universitys moral responsibility. Neisworths duties did not involve direct contact with children, intones the polymath, thus it follows that, in Penn States view, no concern need be shown by the university for his contact with children away from the campus. Thats quite an incredible take on a complaint of child sexual abuse. The total disregard for the safety of children who might come into contact with the alleged employee-pedophile is likewise shocking on a professional and human level. Its also the same approach taken by Spanier, Shultz, Paterno, and Curley, just a year later when they decided that the best option in the face of a credible report of child rape was to tell Sandusky that his youthful guests would no longer be welcome in the Lasch Buildings shower stalls.
What happens away from Penn State stays away from Penn State, or so it was tragically claimed.
Spaniers undue concern for secrecy and his desire to control university operations outside of Board scrutiny may have created a situation that even he cant make disappear. By keeping a blind-fold over the Board, he may have given an opening to victims lawyers by allowing them to argue the Board negligently failed to discharge their oversight duties............ That comment hits like blood in the water for lawyers seeking to prove that the Board shirked its legal obligation to oversee the university and its officials thus permitting the abuse to occur through its collective negligence. This could increase our liability, a current trustee said, possibly by millions............
It was French playwright Victor Hugo who, with the imprint of the bloody French Revolution still seared in the collective mind of his countrymen, declaimed:
The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
Some in the palaces of leadership at Penn State like the Bourbon kings of old ignored this irremeable law of duty as they had so many other things. They should not be surprised by the magnitude of the reckoning.