News comes today that the Penn State Board of Trustees has fired Head Coach Joe Paterno and college president Graham Spanier. This comes atop shocking reports of child sexual abuse by former Penn State defensive line coach Jerry Sandusky. A Pennsylvania Grand Jury has returned charges that Sandusky abused eight boys, starting as young as 8 years old, associated with a charity he started. At least two other Penn State officials are leaving/forced out of their jobs already, and no doubt more will come. Today police are determining who needs to be held accountable for a violent student uprising over the firing of Coach Paterno.
While it’s a shame that Paterno’s career has ended this way, these students need to recognize that this isn’t a steroid scandal. This is child sex abuse. It is shocking and inexcusable. Sandusky needs to be punished to the full extent of the law. Those boys are damaged for life. There is nothing the legal system can do that will give them back what they lost.
And like it or not, both Penn State in general, and Joe Pa in particular, are accountable for it.
A graduate assistant informed Paterno of an egregious incident in 2002. Paterno referred him to college administrators. According to some accounts, Joe Pa became agitated and said, effectively, “don’t tell me about this, tell somebody else.”
This is where the Nittany Lions’ head coach went wrong. Essentially he said, “This isn’t my problem.” But it was. It was his problem because he was the single most powerful figure involved in the entire scandal. He was the leader. It was his ethical responsibility to step up. He didn’t. He never reported the incident to police or followed up with the administrators. Perhaps he satisfied his legal responsibility. But that wasn’t enough.
Instead, Sandusky’s child abuse continued with at least one more boy until that boy went to college and his mother reported the abuse to the attorney general in 2010.
This incident illustrates one of the most pervasive problems in any family or organizational system, including–maybe especially–the church. It’s the problem of secrecy–what systems theorists call “cut-offs.” The skeletons in any family’s or organization’s closet have incredible power. And a secret’s power increases exponentially over time.
In one church I served, a woman became outraged when she discovered that I drink beer. She and her sister took her complaint to her brothers, who were leaders in the church and the community. This caused a lot of embarrassment to the brothers–because they drank, too! In fact, more than once, they’d had me over for a drink with their families!
They had kept their drinking a secret from their sisters for years. The sisters were the youngest in a large family, and at least one of their parents was a serious alcoholic. The older brothers had meant to protect their little sisters, but the secret had taken a life of its own. For decades they and their families had organized their lives around keeping their drinking a secret from the sisters.
But because they were fond of their pastor, and because their own adult children were challenging their behavior, the brothers finally broke the silence.
There comes a point when the way a system has organized to keep a secret becomes more important than the secret itself. The family above was basically a healthy family and they realized that the secret was becoming a burden. But many families don’t realize this. Often a family continues the secret-keeping patterns for generations, even after it has forgotten the secret.
This is why systems theorists call secrets “cut-offs.” Their purpose is to “cut off” some family members from being “in the know.” Often they succeed. But then the next generations are “cut off” from a key dynamic of their history. Still, they likely continue the secretive patterns of behavior they learned from their parents because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Systems folks say that cut-offs are like Black Holes–they are gigantic blobs of darkness that relentlessly pull us back into their maw no matter how hard we try to escape them. If no one had ever caught Sandusky, the odds are that the child sex abuse could have continued for generations, and each generation might have thought they were the first to deal with it.
In fact, for all we know, Sandusky isn’t the first, or the only one, engaged in this abuse. It’s becoming clear that Penn State was well-organized to protect its secrets.
Penn State had become extremely protective of its football program, which had raised them from obscurity to national prominence.Wall Street Journal Online reports that “The Penn State program also developed a reputation as being unusually insular. For years, Mr. Paterno’s salary—unlike almost all coaches at public universities—was unknown to the public. A change in state law finally forced disclosure in 2009.”
That tendency to secrecy is already a clue that there’s a systemic problem. The need to protect a secret concentrates power into the hands of the few who are clued in on the secret. The secret has given them power. They then feel the need to be secretive about other things. This isn’t so much because they need to protect the original secret. Now they want to protect their power.
But soon it goes beyond even that. It becomes, “This is the way we’ve always done it.” They begin to identify the structure they created to protect their secret with what makes them an effective institution.
It may be no coincidence that a year after Penn State was forced to reveal the coach’s salary, the charges against Sandusky could finally be dealt with. Ultimately, every institution’s secrets are connected, and to shed light on one is to begin to break the power of secrecy itself. The entire house of cards is likely to tumble down.
Secrecy gives the secret a multiplier effect. Years ago I served a church where one family’s stubborn hold on its power was slowly killing the church. They had found a way to subvert the election of officers so that their family members were always heavily represented. They had taken over the leadership of key internal organizations so that no “outsider” (i.e., new member or even member of another church family) could really break in.
One of their key strategies was to collect and build upon the secrets that other families kept. For instance, in this community homosexuality was looked down upon, but several long-time members had gay or lesbian children. In certain circumstances, members of this family would loudly proclaim their disgust for homosexuals. In the process, they cowed those families.
At the same time, they were themselves immensely private. Eventually it became clear that they had organized themselves, and were attempting to organize the church, to keep secret an incestuous relationship in their family a generation before.
It would not have been appropriate or fair to make this secret public knowledge. But a leader who knows the secret has key insight into the nature of the systemic dysfunction and is now in a position to bring some healing. Only when I knew the secret driving the dysfunction did I understand who were really creating the trouble; before that, it looked as if others were the cause.
Most important, I could now meet with the family in private and deal pastorally with its real cause. Ultimately, the only way for the church to heal would be for them either to leave or to change.
Penn State is in an uproar right now. It’s not surprising. To a dysfunctional organization, the dysfunction is how it functions. They believe their very identity is threatened.
The only way to combat that is through strong, honest, perceptive leadership. Paterno and Spanier are fired; Penn State will fire or early retire some more folks; and Sandusky will be tried and go to jail. Penn State will then want to say, “Okay, it’s done. Let’s get back to normal.”
But that can’t happen. Strong leaders among the college’s trustees and administration have to look in every closet. They need to examine how the system is organized to keep secrets–and what secrets it’s keeping. They have to do this responsibly and in public, with accountability to the appropriate authorities.
Paterno issued a statement that conveys that he is guilt-ridden and repentant. It’s arguable from a systems perspective that he simply played the role that Penn State’s dysfunctional system expected him to play. But he is a good man, and he knows better than that. He knows he should have spoken up, and he didn’t.
A good man was corrupted because he allowed a corrupt system to convince him that evil was good. That same system allowed eight innocent boys to be victimized in order to protect the reputation of a football team.
We religious types have a word that describes what this kind of system has become. The word is “demonic.”