Lesson at Penn State is that when big sports become the priority, everything else suffers

S.J. Schwaidelson is a Minnesota writer who blogs at The Wifely Person Speaks.

Joe Paterno knew what was happening in his own locker room. We know this because he says he was told. He also says he informed his boss. He did the barest minimum. He did not follow up. He must have known Jerry Sandusky was still around, still harming children.

The horror of the abuse is only compounded by the actions of Penn State students on Wednesday night. Students rioted and overturned cars, tore down light poles and generally rampaged to vent their anger. At what? That the coaching staff at Penn State was complicit in the abuse of children? That their university failed to protect little kids from a sexual predator who was using the school's football facility to lure his victims into harm's way? Or that their team might not go to some bowl game?

We all know that football and other BIG SPORTS, whether at Penn State or the University of Minnesota, take precedence over things academic, moral and ethical. Sports scandals abound. More schools have had to deal with the misbehavior of "student" athletes than not.

But that is not this.

This is about one man who was no longer affiliated with Penn State's football program using its facilities as his den of iniquity. Tangentially, this is about all the other people who knew he was a rapist and turned a blind eye. Not too unlike the case of Kitty Genovese: No one stepped forward when she was screaming for help, just as no one stepped forward to stop Sandusky from raping children.

So whom do we pillory for this? Criminally speaking, Sandusky goes first. And with him goes those who were responsible for calling the cops but did not. Coach Paterno? Well, he's guilty of moral failure and ethics violations. You can't send him to jail for that, but you can fire him (and they did). The president of the university? His resignation pretty much broadcasts that he knew more than has become public knowledge.

But I would also ask a different question: Why didn't anyone step forward? Enough people knew. Whom were they protecting: Sandusky or the university?

For at least three decades, the big sports machine has rolled over academia. Too many colleges and universities, including the University of Minnesota, have suffered student-athlete scandals -- everything from cheating to sex crimes. Does anyone in Minnesota not know the name Jan Gangelhoff? Boosters have violated NCAA rules to provide "services" to their athletes, and boards have turned blind eyes to the abuse. How is what happened at Penn State any different from what has happened here or at any other major university?

It's not. The overinflated importance of big sports on campuses nationwide is out of control. The university provides its athletes a training camp for that odd slavery called pro sports, where contracts are bought, traded and sold. High school athletes go for the best package offered, and it's not an academic one. If the purpose of attending a university is not education but to play sports, are we under some obligation to pay them for running on our turf?

The time is well past for reassessing the role of big sports in colleges and universities. Perhaps it's time to step back from the television contracts, the big scholarship payouts and the money poured into a system that is not designed to educate kids. The time has come to pay attention to teaching our kids, not using them as gladiators for our amusement.

Penn State failed its students as well as its community. The really sad part is that it is not alone in this failure. Pick a campus, any campus, and you will find similar cases of blind eyes turned away for the sake of winning some axe or pig or jug.

We have enough crises at the moment; we don't need this one, too. We need higher education far more than we need more marginally educated athlete fodder for the big-sports grist mill. It just needs to stop.

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