By Dana Shultz

Pennsylvania State was dealt a heavy blow on Monday for its involvement in the child sexual abuse scandal that was centered around former football coach Jerry Sandusky. The NCAA handed Penn State a $60 million fine, banned the football team from competing in bowl games for four years, and vacated all of the team’s wins from 1998 to 2011. As well, legendary former coach Joe Paterno’s statue on campus will soon be removed.

After news of the scandal broke late last year, a grand jury investigation led to Sandusky being indicted on 52 counts of child molestation. Sandusky had founded the charity Second Mile in 1977, which aimed to help young boys in State College, Pennsylvania. The first investigation of sexual abuse took place in 1998, but no formal charges were filed. It wasn’t until 2008 that the mother of the first victim came forward and accused Sandusky of inappropriately touching her son when he was 11 or 12 years old.

The instances of abuse took place between 1994 and 2009, and some suspect even as early as the 1970s. Perhaps even more concerning was that Sandusky performed these acts either on or near Penn State campus. Read the rest of this entry »

In a move that could be seen as being overtly sympathetic, Penn State announced that it plans on giving the late Joe Paterno‘s estate and family millions of dollars worth of payments and benefits as part of his employment contract. So far, the school has given the family four checks, which totaled more than $3 million. These payments were for bonuses that Paterno would have gotten for his work during the season, bowl game, and his entire career. The school has also promised the family the use of a suite in Beaver Stadium for the next 25 years.

Sadly, the family’s lawyer says that they still have the right to sue the school. The lawyer, Wick Sollers, says that there hasn’t been any sort of settlement reached between the school and Paterno’s estate.

“However, there has been a straightforward payment of moneys indisputably owed to the Paterno estate,” he said. “The university had requested that the family agree to a full release in return for the payments under the contract. That request was declined and no release was signed.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Casey Wiley

This past sunny, crisp Sunday December morning, walking in downtown Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, the town in which I live and the town in which today, Tuesday, December 13, Jerry Sandusky, former assistant football coach at Penn State University, waved a preliminary hearing on multiple counts of child sexual assault allegations, a hot restlessness returned to my chest. I took a seat on a bench in front of the court house. I watched two horse-drawn buggies parading bundled children and camera-wielding adults through the town on a hill. A handful of people sauntered by dressed for some reason as characters from “A Christmas Carol.” Mrs. Fezziwig waved excitedly. It took me a moment, but I realized she was waving at me. I waved back, but it was too late; the group was already crossing the street.

Over 1,300 people applied for 100-something seats in Courtroom One. At least six accusers were slated to testify against Sandusky. The case will now proceed to Common Pleas court. One accuser — a man now, but a boy then — testified before a grand jury that he had screamed and screamed from Sandusky’s basement.

This awful scandal lingers thick like a terrible, unremitting pain, like that scream on repeat, louder each time. No, any simile here just sounds silly. As a lecturer in Penn State’s English Department I’ve talked extensively with my shaken students. More personally, I’ve started writing about the scandal. Scrawls in the margin of my class notes. A series of questions. I feel then like I have exercised some control over the distorted environment around me, in me.

Late evening Wednesday night, November 9, my cell phone buzzed on the bedside table. A friend’s text read that I would soon have a new boss. Letting my wife of one month sleep, I slipped out of bed knowing full well that Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno, President and Head football coach, respectively, of Penn State University were no longer employed by the University. On my computer in the darkness of our office I watched trustee John Surma’s press conference. Someone was yelling from the audience of media members. Surma didn’t flinch. As I refreshed tweets from the university’s undergraduate newspaper reporters while scanning tedious YouTube clips of morphing clusters of shadowed students gathering around Old Main on campus and starting to tickle downtown, a growing anxiety built steadily in me for this collected group, which, I assumed, contained some of the students I would see the next day at 8 a.m. for their composition class.

A tweet from “Onward State,” a student-run news organization: “The sound of police sirens and car horns, and the sight of students pouring out of apartments. Headed to a riot.”

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A three-year investigation has led to the arrest of a well-respected Penn State defensive coach. Jerry Sandusky was indicted last week on counts of sexual crimes including rape, sodomy and molestation.

Sandusky, 67, is alleged to have committed sex abuse crimes with eight different minors from the Second Mile program. He abused the children he met through the non-profit organization he founded in 1977 for underprivileged children. He is reported to have sexually abused young boys in Penn State locker rooms, his home and other locations.

In addition to Sandusky, Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and Penn State Interim Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz were also charged on Nov. 5 in link to these alleged crimes.  They both were incriminated with “perjury and failure to report the incident.”

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