Shared Governance Is Awesome, But It Wouldn’t Have Saved Penn State
Michael Bérubé, an incisive observer of the American campus scene, observes the Penn State scandal from an extraordinary perspective. Berube is not just a Penn State scholar, he holds a professorship endowed by Joe Paterno. He has discussed Moby Dick with JoePa, and disability issues with Paterno’s wife — a longtime supporter of the Special Olympics.
And as Bérubé noted in yesterday’s New York Times, PSU has stood for decades as an exception to the collegiate rule that athletic excellence had to come at the expense of academics, and it has done so in no small part because of Paterno himself:
Joe Paterno — author of the “Grand Experiment” that sought to uphold academic standards in a major
