If the disturbing details surrounding Jerry Sandusky and Penn State University's football program prove to be true, little room will exist for debating the culpability of Sandusky's role in breaking a sacred trust with the rights and basic human dignity of children. But surrounding this inexcusable act is a swirling debate about the culpability of those who witnessed Sandusky molesting a child in PSU facilities and then the widening circle of people in power there who knew something about these acts for years without taking full actions to hold Sandusky accountable or to cease his ability to continue destroying the lives of children.
At the center of that secondary failure to act is Mike McQueary, current PSU assistant coach and then graduate assistant at PSU who witnessed Sandusky with a child and chose to walk away from the gruesome scene in order to call his father—and then waited until the next day to report the events to head coach Joe Paterno.
Much of the discussion on ESPN surrounding these events has raised angry questions about McQueary's failure to stop Sandusky and to protect immediately the child.
The details and actions (as well as nonactions) of this situation centered at PSU are not unique, however. The popular media has exposed both tragic and humorous examinations of the seemingly too common human ability to simply stand by silently (or worse, with encouragement) as all sorts of horrors befall innocent people.
The Accused dramatized and in some ways distorted the real-life events surrounding the gang rape of a woman, the cheering onlookers, and the subsequent trial that turned the victim into the accused. Then, about a decade later, the TV sitcom Seinfeld ended with the infamous Good Samaritan episodes highlighting legal concepts of Good Samaritan laws and the duty to rescue.
What are, then, our moral imperatives to act? And when is inaction itself a form of action, a form of action that enables if not promotes all manner of wrongs?
The Scholar-Teacher Imperative
There is a good deal of added horror to the PSU tragedy that these actions and inactions occurred within the walls of education—among not only those in power but also among those who are well educated. I also think that we must not ignore that especially within our schools we have fostered an unhealthy system of hierarchy as well as an idealizing of both authority and objectivity—all of which to the exclusion of both action and ethics.
Traditionally and if possible with even more intensity in the most recent decades, schools are places where people are required to do as they are told, to respect blindly authority, and to seek above all else the dispassionate and objective accumulation or dispensing of facts—as if there are no moral parameters to any of those facts, as if those in authority are above any sort of ethical oversight.
Poet Adrienne Rich has warned that what is “rendered unspeakable, [is] thus unthinkable” (p. 150). [1] And activist/educator Bill Ayers captures that our schools are places where we do not speak and we do not think:
In school, a high value is placed on quiet: “Is everything quiet?” the superintendent asks the principal, and the principal the teacher, and the teacher the child. If everything is quiet, it is assumed that all is well. This is why many normal children—considering what kind of intelligence is expected and what will be rewarded here—become passive, quiet, obedient, dull. The environment practically demands it. (p. 51) [2]
Obedience, silence, and inaction are not just amoral, but immoral in the face of human terror.
I recently wrote about the horror of the imprisoned child sacrificed for the privilege of the people of Omelas in Le Guin's dystopian short story. And what struck me about this incisive story is that Le Guin depicts the mass of people who live with the knowledge of the child and the few who "leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back," but fails to portray those who face evil and seek to change it through action.
Like the people of the fictional Omelas and too often like the seemingly paralyzed McQueary, we have been conditioned to ignore the plight of those being oppressed and dehumanized, to do as we are told, and above all else to believe life is inaction.
Who does it benefit to foster the inactive, the amoral walk through life that is objectivity and dispassionate scholarship? Why do hierarchies of power seek to marginalize those who dare to speak and to act?
Historian, scholar, and activist Howard Zinn lived a life both marginalized and committed to rising above those expectations:
When I became a teacher I could not possibly keep out of the classroom my own experiences. . . .Does not the very fact of that concealment teach something terrible—that you can separate the study of literature, history, philosophy, politics, the arts, from your own life, your deepest convictions about right and wrong?. . .In my teaching I never concealed my political views. . . .I made clear my abhorrence of any kind of bullying, whether by powerful nations over weaker ones, governments over their citizens, employers over employees, or by anyone, on the Right or the Left, who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth. . . .From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. (pp. 7, 173) [3]
Those in power will always call for objectivity and a respect for authority, but these calls are veneer for living with those things we know are wrong and know should be changed.
The media frenzy around the tragedies radiating from PSU is a sort of calloused looking at and speaking about, but it is likely soon we will take the two paths laid out by Le Guin—with most of us going about our lives as if these horrors have not happened, as if these horrors are not happening, and as if there is nothing anyone can do about them.
There are many things about which we should speak and act, but above all else, inaction that allows evil to take away the innocence of a child speaks louder than any words or actions about who each of us is, regardless of what we say.
As students, as teachers, as scholars, as citizens, and as humans, it is ours to speak and to think, as Rich suggests, but it is also ours to act for that which is right, especially against those people who fail to see the human dignity of every single child.
[1] Rich, A. (2001). Arts of the possible: Essays and conversations. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.
[2] Ayers, W. (2001). To teach: The journey of a teacher (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
[3] Zinn, H. (1994). You can't be neutral on a moving train: A personal history of our times. Boston: Beacon Press.