Professors call for basic changes as response to Sandusky

Given the circumstances and the current climate, it makes sense that Penn State installed Dave Joyner, a member of its board of trustees, as interim athletic director. The school needs to hire a new football coach and new AD and since it doesn't even have a permanent president to lead the search, the trustees better have a handle on the process.

Maybe the only surprise is that Gov. Corbett didn't make it a temporary cabinet position.

The bigger question is whether Penn State, and the whole of college sports, takes this as an opportunity to at least look at the possibilities for fundamental change. Some faculty at Penn State clearly hope this is the case.

What could change? What are some questions that should be asked right now?

In an e-mail in which he asserted he was responding as an individual and not as the next chairman of Penn State's Faculty Senate - Larry Catá Backer said he believes there are governance issues that should be looked at seriously within Penn State.

"It is interesting that in the coverage to date, the focus on institutional issues have been on the students and administration," wrote Backer, the W. Richard and Mary Eshelman faculty scholar and professor of law and professor of international affairs. "The role of the faculty in shared governance remains insufficiently explored, both by outsiders and among the administration and faculty."

Backer mentioned other areas that he thought deserved further discussion. Among them:

"The makeup and direction of the Independent Committee of the Board'' - this is the group, led by a board of trustees member, that will investigate the university's role in the Jerry Sandusky affair. "Their recommendations might well be profound,'' Backer said.

"The development of systems of monitoring and reporting that reflects both the need to preserve a coherent system of governance but that does not insulate administrators. This is an issue that has been important in the private sector."

"The role of the Governor going forward; I wonder how carefully people listened to the Governor at the Board of Trustees meeting or were interested in the possible changing relationships between the Governor and the Board, something that may affect everything from budget to policy issues at the university."

Whether the wider world of big-time college sports undergoes big change is debatable.

"It's interesting to me that the American public and probably most colleges and universities are sufficiently used to excesses involving finances, commercialism, academic transcripts, and so on that these issues are comparable to some disease that can be deflected by institutional penicillin," said John Thelin, a University of Kentucky education professor and author of A History of American Higher Education. "But the issue and incident of child abuse and molestation seems to be one of the issues that has genuine ability to upset the American public and, hence, boards of trustees."

That said, Thelin added in an e-mail, "Odious and unexpected as the PSU case is, I doubt it will decisively trigger structural or wholesale change.  To me, the root cause of all this is our reliance on a board of trustee system in which a group has great power yet is not especially informed or involved in higher education matters - so, by default, presidents have a lot of power with little oversight - until the earthquake hits.  And then it is too late.''

Thelin said the system in place at Penn State is a standard-enough one. "If other institutions were wise, they would be watching and heeding this."

Thelin is hesitant to suggest Penn State's board of trustees will look to affect widespread change.

"Firing the president and coach is almost like rounding up the usual suspects," Thelin said. "I thought the board got off easy."

Taylor Branch, a historian who has taken on college sports as his latest project - and found the whole system inherently flawed - said he believes there is a possibility for wider change here.

"I think it will only happen if people question what their definition of scandal is," Branch said this week in a telephone interview. "If they still want to think that scandal is some money that leaks to players to pay for a tattoo, then nothing will change."

Branch - who wrote "The Cartel, Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA," earlier this year in the Atlantic, then expanded it into an e-book - points out that at colleges that compete in big-time sports, money and power are concentrated "in precisely those people who were fired and indicted at Penn State."

While doing his research, Branch said, several college presidents at big-time football schools told him that they made a salary two or three times higher than they would otherwise solely so there wouldn't be such a disparity with the huge salary of their school's football coach.

Branch said he isn't trying to suggest that sexual molesters are working on other campuses, but the system in place at Penn State, "this system exists everywhere," Branch said.

Writing on his own web site, Branch came to this conclusion: "Inevitably, reform would grant NCAA players, like Olympians, a stake in sports governance. Newly established checks and balances could curb the corruptions of concentrated power, but change will not come easy. The NCAA system is deeply entrenched at more than a hundred schools where big-money sports are glorified. It promotes greed, punishes the weak, rewards the exploiters, and fleeces the players, all while claiming to police itself. An overhaul, while sadly too late for the Penn State victims, is long overdue."

At Penn State, Backer brings up a couple of other issues he thinks need to be examined, such as the "protection of whistleblowers," as well as "fostering effective systems of engagement and communication among critical stakeholders - administrators, students, faculty, community, police, parents - while remaining respectful to the culture of teaching and research at the heart of the university's mission."

Maybe here is Backer's bottom line, that the focus on "systemic changes" at Penn State needs to go beyond the office of the president.

"Everyone speaks about the university culture that needs changing," Backer said in his e-mail. "That culture, one might suspect, extends well beyond the central administration and the athletics department."