...Penn State Scandal Everything was looking good for Joe Paterno and Penn State football as his football managing career rose with an overall record of 298-136-3 but in 2011, all that changed. Back in 2000 a janitor of Penn State witnessed Sandusky receiving oral sex from a young boy, the janitor reported what he saw to co-workers and his supervisor but none of these men reported these actions to authorities. It wasn’t until November 5, 2011 that Sandusky was arrested on a $100,000 bail and up to 40 criminal counts. ESPN were quickly in the scene to investigate and report the allegations on Sandusky. They quickly reported saying Sandusky was charged with more than 50 counts of child sex-abuse involving 10 boys he met through The Second Mile, a children's charity he founded. New York Times went on to report Sandusky has been accused of these charges before hand and action was never taken until now. 2 days after Sandusky’s arrest, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president for finance and business Gary Schultz stepped down from their positions, also being facing charges for not notifying the police for Sandusky’s actions. On December 16, 2011, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz were held for trial. "I don't remember any reports to me that it was sexual in nature," Mr. Curley told the grand jury, a statement prosecutors contend was a lie (Schmitz) Tim Curley allegedly said he did not report anything to the authorities because he felt a crime never occurred. This controversy led...
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...Penn State has done something truly remarkable the past few years. Not only have they resurrected their football program, they’ve restored it as a powerhouse in college football. With continued effort and divine help in the coming years, the Nittany Lions could soon compete for a national championship with head coach James Franklin deserving the credit. Franklin, who the university hired in January 2014, filled the void left by Bill O’Brien, who fled the college to coach the NFL’s Houston Texans. Penn State hired O’Brien in January 2012 to take over for interim head coach Tom Bradley, who had spent more than 30 years at Penn State. That brings us to who Bradley filled in for. It has been six years since Penn State unceremoniously axed Joe Paterno, as well as several other big wigs at the school. It’s well known that Paterno was fired because of the child sex abuse scandal involving longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky, but it’s still amazing how much the scandal lingers in the American psyche....
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...The Penn State Scandal: Destructive Leadership Perspective The Penn State Scandal: Destructive Leadership Perspective Abstract The Penn State scandal stressed the involvement of key players in a web of deception, cover-up and sexual accusations of children. Those key players stressed in the case were Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno. Jerry Sandusky was accused of sexually abusing 10 boys over a 15 year period. Sandusky was ultimately found guilty of these charges. Other well-known names, such as Joe Paterno, were arrested and charged with conspiracy because of their failure to report the child abuse. This scandal rocked the Penn State community. Mainly because their culture was driven by a strong college sports influence. Many people wondered how such a strong community of leaders could allow something so awful to happen for so long. Observers of the scandal tended to frame the events in terms of individuals behaving badly or irresponsibly (Alderfer, 2013). So many focus on the leaders involved and neglect to identify an organization as a whole when discussing issues. Many people will participate in the destruction of an organization whether knowingly or not. Why do so many fail to identify all the elements in leadership? What other factors besides leadership contribute to destruction of an organization? Many areas were researched in regards to the organizational leadership of this paper. This paper will evaluate the destructive leadership of Penn State as a whole...
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...Destructive Leadership and The Penn State Scandal: A Toxic Triangle Perspective Christian N. Thoroughgooda and Art Padillab a The Pennsylvania State University, Department of Psychology, 115C Bruce V. Moore Building, University Park, PA 16802; cnt105@psu.edu b The University of Arizona, Eller College of Management, Tucson, AZ 85721 Alderfer’s piece on the Sandusky/Penn State tragedy reminds us that leader-centric analyses, the norm in leadership studies, often miss the mark. Alderfer joins a growing list of writers who increasingly recognize that leadership consists of three key elements in a triangle: leaders, followers, and environments. The Penn State scandal highlights how a conducive environment, typified by centralized power and an absence of checks and balances, coupled with flawed leaders and the actual assistance or quiet submission of certain followers, can lead to disastrous outcomes. As Alderfer observes, leadership is a social, or group, process. Leadership success or failure depends on group results, and group results involve more than just leaders and their characteristics and actions. Yet, over three-quarters of articles in scholarly journals consistently overlook the role of organizational environments and followers (Porter & McLaughlin, 2006), focusing instead on leader traits and behaviors (Kaiser, Hogan, & Craig, 2008; Thoroughgood, Padilla, Hunter, & Tate, 2012). Why do so many articles and stories focus on leaders and neglect the two other crucial elements...
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...William Penn was born in a foreign country but would help shape The United States of America into the resolute country it is known as today. Not only did he help form the United States by his ideas and treaties but he also founded the State of Independence formally known as Pennsylvania. William was born on the fourteenth of October in the year of 1644. His father, Sir William Penn was a commendable landowner and his mother Margaret Jasper Vanderschuren was a merchant’s daughter. Not much is known about Penn’s childhood besides the fact that he was enthusiastic about religion from a young age. When William was only thirteen his love for the Quakers began after hearing a speech from a popular Quaker leader Thomas Loe. Years later before starting college Penn served in the parliamentary navy during the Puritan Revolution. After a successful time in the war he was rewarded by an english statesman Oliver Cromwell. Unfortunately William’s award of land in Ireland he had earned during the war didn’t last very long. This was due to the fact the he soon fell out of Cromwell’s favor after taking part in the restoration of King Charles the...
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...Penn State is an isolated, respected institution that often has done what it wanted. It has the power to ignore ethical issues, at least at times. This is not unique to Penn State but would be true of many institutions and people with great power. Both conscious desires to make money and maintain prestige, and unconscious denial served to maintain a child abuser, Jerry Sandusky, as a football coach for many years, with many victims. (Eisenman, 2013) Everything was looking good for Joe Paterno and Penn State football in 2011. The team was 8-1 and riding an emotional high. Then it all came crashing down. Back in 2001 a graduate assistant coach of Penn State wasn’t exactly sure what he saw but a former Assistant Coach named Jerry Sandusky was showering with a boy from his local charity. It sounded to him like horseplay but wasn’t sure so he went and reported it to the head coach Joe Paterno. The ensuing scandal brought down longtime coach Joe Paterno, who was fired by university trustees amid growing criticism that he should have done more to stop the alleged abuse.” (Marklein, 2011) McQueary changed his story saying he e-mailed his friends and colleagues, saying that he had stopped Sandusky from abusing the boy when he saw it and that he had also reported the abuse to police. The local and campus police denied his statements that brought him into deeper trouble. When he reported it to the coach he was so flustered he couldn’t even report correctly what he saw, so Coach Paterno...
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...During the year 2011, Pennsylvania “Penn” State University underwent a child sex abuse scandal resulting in its reputation forever changed (Lane, 2014). This iconic university and its football program were further victimized after uncovering years of involvement from the administrative cover-ups of the sexual assaults of children by assistant football coach, Gerald “Jerry” Sandusky, hereinafter referred to as Sandusky (Lane, 2014). Despite the backlash resulting from the surfacing of the child sex scandal, Penn State has since made major strides in its image improvement (Lane, 2014). In November 2011, former assistant football coach, Gerald Sandusky was arrested in the result of the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal (Lane, 2014). Maintaining his innocence from charges stemming from a grand jury indictment, Sandusky provided statements that he merely “horsed around” with the boys, all of which he met through...
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...ACC 7480 Penn State Case Leslie Erickson October 1, 2012 The Penn State Scandal reflects many failures of the governance system at all levels of the university and not only with in the Board of Trustees. As reported in the Freeh Report, chapter 1 (Key Findings); each school and large department of Penn State have their own Human Resources Staff. Amongst the individual Human Resources Departments if they hadn’t opted out; they were at least lazy with standard rules and procedures for implementing University Policies and rules (includes over 350 policies and procedures for which oversight and compliance is decentralized and uneven). In addition there was no centralized office, officer or committee to oversee compliance with laws, regulations, policies and procedures. Some departments even monitored their compliance issues with the very limited resources available to them from within the departments. The university Police Department was responsible for compliance with the Cleary Act which requires the university to collect crime statistics relating to designated crimes; including sexual offenses occurring on university property and make timely warning of certain crimes that pose an ongoing threat to the community and prepare an annual safety report to be distributed to the campus community. The Cleary Act also requires “Campus Security Authorities” (Coaches, athletes and directors) to report crimes to the Police Department. From 1991-2007 the university delegated Cleary...
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...The scandal at Penn State that was the cause of Jerry Sandusky performing questionable acts of sexual child abuse has devastated the environment at the university. As a crisis management consultant, I would analyze the preconditions that took place before the crimes began. The scandal that consisted of Jerry Sandusky performing sexual child abuse has put Penn State in a position where the word difficult would be an understatement. The amount of backlash the university is receiving from every portion of the stakeholders is overwhelming. The media, students, parents, and faculty are all concerned with the university. As a crisis management consultant I require Penn State to be as proactive as possible. The university must understand the position...
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...The Penn State scandal over the internet gave similar testimonies as to what took place all those years on the Pennsylvania campus. It involved Jerry Sandusky and his child molestation behavior. However, one article focuses on just how involved Joe Paterno, the head football coach, was with the information that he knew about but chose to conceal. An investigation uncovered that Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s assistant coach had sexually assaulted ten young boys (Belson, 2012). Louis Freeh was a former federal judge and director of the FBI who was involved in the investigation. His report, according to Belson (2012), pointed out that the senior officials at the school turned a blind’s eye toward the welfare of children. Their silence attributed to...
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...The Penn State University scandal was about an authority figure committing child sex abuse. Jerry Sandusky was a former assistant football coach for Penn State and charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse against children. He was convicted of 45 counts of sexual predator against children. Sandusky used his charity, The Second Mile, to select his victims. These illegal actions were committed between 1994 and 2009. There were other Penn State University officials implicated in legal, moral and ethical responsibilities for not reporting the crimes to the University’s Board of Trustees. Those included in the scandal for covering up the actions of Sandusky were university president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, vice president...
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...The court will likely hold Penn State University is liable for negligence actions on the sexual harassment to young children by its former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Under the common law, negligence is defined as failure to exercise ordinary care and caution as would be expected by a reasonably prudent person. Therefore, in order to establish a cause of action in negligence, the plaintiff must show (1) a duty on the part of defendant, (2) a breach of that duty, and (3) an injury or damage proximately resulting from the breach. The first element that a duty on the part of defendant to protect the plaintiff is sufficiently met. According to the law, the owner or operator of a sport or recreation business owes a duty to keep the premises safe for all who enter the facility or premises. The incident occurred on Penn State campus. As the owner, the university is imposed a duty of care to individuals coming to the land. The second and third requirements, that the university breaches that duty and the breach was the proximate cause of children’s damages, are in question. The plaintiff will likely be able to charge that Penn State failed to exercise control over coaching staff. In loco parentis doctrine, the relationship between a student athlete and a school is unique and special. School authorities stand “in place of the parents” and the relationship involves a mutual dependence and control by colleges over student-athletes’ lives. Thus a heightened duty...
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...Organizational Behavior in the Case of the Penn State Sex Abuse Scandal Kelley Griffin OL-500 Human Behavior in Organization Southern New Hampshire University Lisa Wright March 23, 2013 Organizational Behavior in the Case of the Penn State Sex Abuse Scandal In 2012, “former Penn State defensive coordinator Gerald “Jerry" Sandusky was found guilty of sexual abuse. . . . He was accused of sexually abusing 10 boys over a 15-year period in a scandal that has rocked the university's community” (Chappell, 2012, para. 1). When the story of Jerry Sandusky broke to the press, the University board believed the investigation currently underway at their university was solely concerning Jerry Sandusky, but unbeknownst to them, the organizational breakdown of Penn State was involved in the investigation as well. The investigation analyzed documents and conversations from Penn State’s leaders that spanned from 1998 to 2011. What came to light was that Sandusky, a renowned alumni of 32 years, ex-Penn State football coach, and an active member in youth charity programs, had been sexually harassing minors on and off university property. In addition, at various points during this time frame, leaders in various positions within Penn State’s organization knew of these accounts and did nothing about it. This report aims to focus on how the organizational culture as well as the breakdown in leadership responsibilities, aided in the allowance of such acts to continue...
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...Reflection - Penn State Student Drinking Behavior The first two observations I made about the survey data were that college age drinking habits have not changed from year to year in a drastic way and students still tend to experience drinking and partying early in their college studies. About age 18 to 19 students transition from high school to this huge opportunity to be out from under the parental “house rules” for the first time in their lives. According to the Pulse survey, 83% of the 1,174 respondents were between the ages of 18 to 20 and 68.7% admitting to light to moderate drinking. These data points are not surprising to me. I think back to my initial college years and my own drinking habits and experiences. I grew up in a college town. Once, I entered college, I quickly learned a way to schedule my classes around evenings I knew I would want to socialize with fellow students which included drinking. I was a typical moderate drinker on weekends and drinking, even though I was under age, was an easy way to wind down and socially acceptable. I think this mentality still holds true with that age range of college students today. What changed for me and many of my friends by the time we were around 20 years of age (junior year) was our focus. We began to settle down into our studies or decide what our paths were going to be. For me, I began my own business and was engaged to marry and exited college. For many of my friends that continued on with school...
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...Pennsylvania State University are a big part of campus life and are a successful building block of campus atmosphere and interactivity. Students at Penn State pride themselves by their involvement in various organizations, the roles, responsibilities, and success they have garnered. However, the daunting responsibility that relates to administrative responsibility can be scary. It's a wonder why the unwieldy administrative responsibilities of student leaders deter many distinguished students from pursuing their passion,...
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