More Penn State Fallout--Former Coach McQueary Files Whistleblower Suit

And so the PSU/Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno saga continues.  At some point it will become clear to the people at PSU that they can't win for losing.  Specifically, there are no good choices for the University at this point, only increasingly bad ones.

I suppose this latest lawsuit could be assessed in terms of people and institutions getting what's coming to them--Penn State allowed itself to become a karmic black hole, and so therefore it should expect noxious consequences for some time.  But this is also a very good example of how a bad management culture can create effects that reverberate long after the principal miscreants have left the scene.  

The failure of the University to deal with the former coach's reporting Sandusky abusing a child ten years ago continues to create fallout for the school.  That initial failure led to the school removing the coach when he ultimately was identified as the key witness against Sandusky (and Joe Paterno).  It was clear that McQueary couldn't continue at PSU under the circumstances.  But it was also clear that his termination was fraught with legal difficulties for the school.  

Damned if you do and if you don't--the only way for PSU to avoid a lawsuit was to reach some kind of severance agreement.  Agreement has been in limited supply in State College lately.

Entitlement Mentality

It's not Penn State, or even Ohio State, but the latest college football scandal at UNC speaks volumes about how big time college athletics is run, even at non-factory schools.

Phony coursework and assignments for football players in the African-American studies department were so obvious that it should have been detected almost immediately, at least by the people providing academic oversight of the athletic department (this is nothing new, although easy courses for football players in my day were grounded a little more in the hard sciences, e.g. a "rocks for jocks" geology offering).  Perhaps the fact that the courses were being taught by the head of the department (make that the "former" head of the department) provided a smokescreen for what was actually going on.  But no one can read these accounts without thinking that the whole enterprise of major college athletics is corrupt and corrupting, from recruitment to graduation.

And it's that corruption and corrupting influence that we see on display now in Chapel Hill, and in State College, PA. Once a program sends the word that integrity doesn't matter, it's not much of a leap from wholesale academic fraud that no one bothers to report, to turning a blind eye to allegations of sexual assault.

There needs to be some serious housecleaning of this entire system.

Paterno's Failure

And so now we know that Penn State coach Joe Paterno, after getting a credible report of horrific behavior from one of his assistants, simply kicked it up the management food chain and then stopped thinking about it.  He never acted like someone who thought, really thought, about what would happen if the allegations were true, or if his legal superiors (but who were not the keepers of his legacy) treated this report the way he did.

I still don't get it.  You can't be the head coach of a program that prides itself on above board, upright operation, and turn something like this over to bureaucrats without a second thought.  By the time this event happened, Penn State football was a brand, and so was Paterno.  He abandoned both.

This is a lesson that needs to be reinforced to senior management everywhere--just being legal isn't enough sometimes.  Sometimes you have to take responsibility for the organization's character and well being.  Amazingly, no one thought about what the revelation that a potential pedophile operated within the halls of the Penn State athletic department would mean, to the kids affected, to the organization, or to various individuals on the periphery.  This was a monumental failure of judgement, character, ethics, fortitude, and just about every other quality we believe is essential to running an effective business.  A failure at all levels, too.

UPDATE:  And so the whole miserable house of cards that was the Paterno empire comes crashing down.  Again, what is evident is that the money, prestige, and political influence of big time college athletics simply overwhelmed the values and judgment of the people running the school.  This affair is another lesson that power corrupts, and allowing one individual to amass so much influence is a recipe for disaster.  On occasion I deal with clients that have the misfortune to have created people like Paterno in his last few years.  Invariably, I counsel them to jettison the employee at first opportunity.  Otherwise, the entire organization becomes infected with the moral decay emanating from the power center.
I'll hope this lesson is taken seriously in organizations across the country, but I doubt it will be more than a year or two before we read of some similar ethical failure.

An Employment Lawyer's View of the Paterno Situation

I've counseled corporate clients many times on removing senior-level executives, and the odd Paterno termination process, with its hand-delivered letter and curt telephone call 10 minutes before the Board of Directors announced the firing, makes perfect sense to me.

It's clear that there has been an acknowledgment at the senior levels of Penn State leadership that Paterno needed to go for some time. Several years ago, representatives of the University management team went to Paterno's house to ask him to step down from his head coach position. Paterno threw them out. Either before or after that particular event, the realization must have come to the Penn State board that by wallowing in the financial success of the football program, and allowing Paterno's successful record in football (unblemished by NCAA violations) to become the focus of the University, they had created a monster that perceived itself to be totally outside their control.

Now, it's great to be a monster, as long as you're only facing people with figurative pitchforks and torches. But as a monster, you have to be careful not to do something so, well, monstrous, that ultimately allows the pitchfork crowd to get a monster of its own.

That's what Paterno ended up doing here. And because he's a monster, or because he's 80+ years old, or for some other reason, Paterno didn't realize that the monster he created was about to gobble him up. By acting like a monster himself, Paterno set up a situation in which the university owed him literally nothing in terms of process, hearing, or explanation.

In short, Paterno become dangerous to the brand he mistakenly thought was his. The economic value of continuing with him to the end of the season, or even giving him the opportunity to defend himself (I'm not sure he can, anyway), was less than the economic damage his presence directing the team would inflict.  The monster of terrible, continuing publicity, was bigger than the monster of Joe Paterno.

An easy choice, in the end.

Dealing With A Ghastly Scandal

"Appalled" would be far too mild a word to describe my reaction to the Penn State sexual assault allegations.

For those of you looking for a lesson as to how something awful can totally spin out of control for your organization, review that first sentence. "… the Penn State sexual assault allegations." Not the Jerry Sandusky sexual assault allegations-this awful episode is now totally within the Penn State brand. It doesn't matter that Sandusky, a former longtime defensive coordinator for the PSU football team, was no longer working for the University when these terrible events started coming to light. The incomplete and apparently uncoordinated response of the PSU leadership to what was witnessed and reported by a graduate student places a significant amount of blame at the very top of the Penn State athletic department.

We know from reading the initial reports that there may be a valid legal defense for the two Penn State administrators, who have been arraigned on charges of failing to report criminal sexual activity involving children, and perjury. We know that iconic coach Joe Paterno is not accused of any legal wrongdoing. But surely somebody at least contemplated whether there could be a valid moral, public relations or business justification for failing to do more on the information the athletic department received in 2002.

Irrespective of the fact that what was being reported was a criminal sexual assault on a child by an individual with almost total access to the Penn State athletic facilities, and who enjoyed the trust of everyone at the University, I have to believe that some adult in this miserable process thought about what this would be like if the administration's attempt to sweep it under the rug was unsuccessful, or if the benign assumption about Sandusky was wrong. How someone could possibly believe that there was any type of upside - moral, business, personal - in not making this a formal investigation and complaint is simply staggering.

Under the circumstances, it's probably wise to revisit a few of my basic truisms about corporate conduct. No. 1 -- whitewashing something like this and being found out almost always creates a situation far worse than does reporting the misconduct when it first surfaces. No. 2 -- a cover-up will almost always be found out; and the worse the conduct, the more likely the cover-up will be unsuccessful. No.3 -- there is no proper explanation, at least not one that you can make and continue to look at yourself in the mirror each day, for not intervening to stop a sexual assault on a child, and/or not immediately reporting what you observed to the police. No.4 -- there are certain circumstances in which there is no such thing as the "benefit of the doubt."  And last -- the more difficult the choice confronting the organization (i.e., confronting the individuals in the organization making the choice), the more likely that the easy choice is the wrong one.

All of us know how we would like to think we would act in circumstances similar to those confronting Joe Paterno, his graduate assistant, and the Penn State athletic director and Penn State's senior vice president for business and finance. Reminding ourselves of the truisms above might help our decision-making process become closer to our ideal.

UPDATE:  I agree with the assessments expressed here.

UPDATE #2:  The inevitable conclusion (note that there has been sentiment to ask Paterno to step down for some time; this provides the obvious mechanism since he seemed impervious to hints).  The PSU Board and its alumni supporters simply could not stand the thought of showing up at the remaining games this season and being confronted by protests and signs saying "Welcome molesters", and the like.  As the article says, someone finally decided to act like an adult at State College.  The decision comes at least 13 years too late.