Alums in shock: 'This can't happen at my Penn State'

Penn State's greatest legacy may not be football, or its famous coach, but rather its alumni, many of whom are appalled at what has happened at their beloved university.

"It's just been horrifying," said Gene Spinelli, 48, of Haddonfield, an investment banker who met his wife at Penn State and whose son is a junior there. "You wake up every morning and ask yourself, Is this really happening?

"So little of the focus has been on the victims," he added. "The university has really failed miserably up and down the chain of command to do the right thing. As alumni, you feel very much betrayed. The thing that alumni should do is we should set up a fund for victims. The money I'm going to send to Penn State next year, send to a fund for victims. Not for Penn State's liability, but for the victims."

In interviews over the last few days, loyal and thoughtful alumni have expressed incredible pain and anguish. They do feel let down, angry and above all sad. Most talk about the children first, the alleged abuse victims, and the horror that the university they love, the university that stood for goodness, could take no action. And on this point they feel the most upset.

But they also feel sad for themselves, and for their institution, because they know it is tarnished.

A week ago, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was indicted on 40 counts of child abuse, including allegations that he raped a boy in the Penn State football locker-room shower. Also crushing to these alumni is the grand jury's finding that Joe Paterno, the legendary coach, knew to some degree of Sandusky's alleged sexual misconduct in 2002 and did not act aggressively to stop it.

"That's the hardest thing in all of this," added Spinelli. "Why Paterno didn't act. It's inexplicable."

They see the same moral and perhaps legal failure in other administrators. Both Paterno and university president Graham Spanier were fired on Wednesday. The athletic director and a vice president for finance have been indicted on charges of lying to the grand jury and failing to report alleged abuse to police.

"The emotions I've gone through over the week, I hate to compare it to this, but the only thing in my adult life I can compare it to are the days after 9/11," said Peter Moosbrugger, 47, who spent 14 years at Penn State, earning his undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degree in electrical engineering.

He described his feelings as "part shock, part disbelief, and part not necessarily denial, but not knowing what I feel like, and not realizing at first just how earth-shattering it was."

Moosbrugger lives near Denver and flew in for Saturday's game against Nebraska.

"I feel terrible for the kids and their families," he added. "I was active in the Centre County Youth Services Bureau. I was a volunteer there for many years, worked in the Big Brother program. I knew people who worked at Second Mile [the charitable organization Sandusky founded]. I knew what kind of kids they were trying to serve. It breaks my heart to know that if these allegations are true that Jerry Sandusky was a fraud and a predator."

The grand jury report states that Mike McQueary, a former Penn State quarterback, witnessed the rape in 2002 when working as a graduate assistant. Rather than intervening, it states, a distraught McQueary called his father, who advised him to see Paterno.

The grand jury report said McQueary told Paterno exactly what he saw. (McQueary has since been placed on administrative leave.) Paterno, according to the report, said he was told only that something "sexual in nature" had happened.

Paterno passed the information to the athletic director, according to the report, but it appears that is all Paterno did. The incident was never reported to police.

The presentment also states that university police investigated allegations against Sandusky in 1998 and wrote a 30-page report, although no charges were filed.

"There's nothing that happened at the university that he [Paterno] did not know about," said Joe Turkos, 41, a 1991 graduate and now sports editor of a weekly paper in Roxborough. "He built the program and the school into what it is today, but that didn't give him the right to destroy it. But that's kind of what he's done, and what the administration has done."

Greg Gambale, 33, of Conshohocken, went to Penn State from 1996 to 2000 and works in financial sales.

"My first reaction was complete disbelief," he said. "This can't happen at my Penn State, not the Penn State I know and love. As the past couple days have been unfolding and the reality has set in, it's getting even harder to deal with. What Sandusky did is horrible. And [it's] a huge miscarriage of justice to sweep it under the rug.

"And they continue to do things in a way that's turning my stomach," he added. "I think they made the right decision by making him [Paterno] step down. I do think it was unfortunate the way it was done" - by a phone call.

Britt Miller, an artist and 2008 graduate living in Paris, e-mailed: "It's terrible for the victims of the abuse, but I also think it's terrible for one of Penn State's great leaders to have to come down like this. I'm a proud Penn Stater and have seen firsthand all of the good that Joe Paterno has brought to the campus and people there; his lifetime of achievement to the football team and university doesn't deserve to end in scandal. I think the focus should remain on the criminal and disgusting human being, Sandusky."

Paterno, 84, was a classics major at Brown University. And he was instrumental in preserving Penn State's classics department when it was on the budgetary chopping block in the 1990s. His own downfall compares to a Greek tragedy, which nobody will understand better than he, according to Mark Munn, a classics professor at Penn State.

"The classic definition of tragedy in the Greek sense," Munn said, is when "there is a flaw that someone is willfully ignorant of and it undoes you in the end. And that's what's happened here.

"I'm loath to say I feel betrayed by Joe Paterno," he added. "In an institutional way he's been such a benefactor. That epitomizes what so many feel. It's so hard to say what must be said, and that is by an error of omission he has condemned himself and along with that the rest of us to a stain of great shame."

Munn added: "Something we believed in - that strong principles of rectitude guided what went on here - we can see in an important and very insidious way was just not true. That's just hard to give voice to, and it's hard to admit, but it is what we feel and it is why we are so upset."

Marta Hall, 55, a 1977 graduate and the sister of Moosbrugger, the electrical engineer, said the week's events had left her incredibly sad, but she hoped at least one positive development would emerge.

"I think it will increase adults' responsibilities" in preventing child abuse, she said. "When you see something, you have to do more than your job. You have to report it to the police. You can't just pass it up the line."

Hall is on the board of Fellowship House in Camden, a center for young people.

"We've got to make sure we have criminal background checks on people and follow procedures," Hall said. "It may seem like a waste of time, but it's really important. . . . Make sure systems are in place. When something happens, you can't always rely on your own judgment. You have to follow the guidelines. People aren't perfect."

Spinelli, the investment banker, said he would not abandon Penn State. He loves it too much.

"It's who and what we are," he said. "But we're watching very closely how things are going to be done going forward. Like it or not, there's going to be a line: before this happened and after this happened in Penn State's history. We have to watch and see how decisions are made."