It’s a fact of life that is sometimes hard to admit: Everybody in life is replaceable. The president is replaceable. The pope is replaceable. And so is a college football coach. Even a legend like Joe Paterno. For whatever reason, some Pennsylvania State University officials never fully appreciated this fact of life, and as a result its reputation has been sullied and the lives of innocent boys have been forever scarred. During the course of the past 15 years, Penn State had numerous opportunities to confront this crisis. But time after time, the university sat on its hands, perhaps hoping that this sordid story would simply go away. Crisis management is about identifying areas of potential risk and developing plans for managing the crisis. Penn State did neither and, as a result, today the university is paying dearly for this mistake.
According to a just-released grand jury report, in 1998 the mother of an 11-year-old boy called university police to complain after finding out her son had showered with Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. A state Department of Public Welfare investigator told the grand jury that Sandusky had showered with the boy and hugged him and “admitted that it was wrong” and promised to not shower with the boy again.
