Chapter 13 Assignment: Analyze the case study below and respond

Chapter 13 Assignment: Analyze the case study below and respond to each of the questions.

Each question has multiple facets, be sure to speak to all of them.

Instructions: 

Grading will be based on:

• Answering all questions completely and thoughtfully.

• Evidence the responses are your own thoughts and not AI generated

• Professionalism/Academic presentation (grammar, format…)

When writing your case study analysis paper, move beyond simply summarizing the events or facts of the case. A strong analysis does not read like a book report. Instead, it demonstrates your understanding of the course concepts by thoughtfully examining how and why they apply to the situation presented. Assume the reader is already familiar with the case itself and focus your effort on interpretation, evaluation, and insight.

Your paper should clearly identify relevant theories or models from the reading and apply them directly to the case. Explain how these concepts help illuminate key issues. Support your analysis with specific examples from the case or other sources, but avoid retelling the narrative.

Case 13.3 Penn State Sexual Abuse Scandal

In the 46 years that Joe Paterno was head football coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions, he racked up 409 victories and was the most victorious football coach in the history of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Paterno called his brand of coaching “The Grand Experiment” because he aimed to prove that football excellence and academic integrity could coexist. Imbuing his program with the motto “Success With Honor,” Paterno was as interested in the moral character of his players as in their physical abilities, a fact borne out by the program’s unusually high graduation rates (Mahler, 2011).

Over four decades, a positive mythology enveloped the program, the university, and Paterno, instilling a fervent Penn State pride in students, faculty, staff, athletes, and fans across the globe, contributing to Penn State’s reputation as one of the most highly regarded public universities in the United States.

But in 2011, a child sexual abuse scandal involving a former Penn State assistant football coach caused “The Grand Experiment” to tumble from its high perch, bringing down with it not only Coach Paterno, the university’s athletic director Tim Curley, and the storied Penn State football program, but also the university’s president, Graham B. Spanier. The seeds of the scandal began in 1977 when Penn State’s then defensive line coach Jerry Sandusky established a nonprofit organization called The Second Mile that was described as a “group foster home devoted to helping troubled boys.”

Sandusky’s position and association with Penn State gave the charity credibility, but The Second Mile ultimately proved to be a cover and conduit for Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys. It is alleged that through The Second Mile, Sandusky was able to identify and meet many of the young men who ultimately became his victims.

Fast-forward to more than 30 years later when, in 2008, the mother of a high school freshman reported to officials that her son was sexually abused by Sandusky. Sandusky had been retired from Penn State since 1999, but continued to coach as a volunteer, working with kids through his Second Mile charity. As a result of the call, the state’s attorney general launched an investigation of Sandusky, and evidence was uncovered that this wasn’t the first time Sandusky had been alleged of committing sexual abuse.

Allegations of his abuse had been cropping up since the late 1990s. In 1998, the mother of an 11-year-old boy called Penn State University police after she learned her son had showered naked with Sandusky in the campus’s athletic locker room and that Sandusky touched the child inappropriately. At the time, Paterno, Curley, and Spanier, as well as Gary C. Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business, were all informed of the incident, and an investigation was conducted.

Even though police talked with another boy who reported similar treatment, they opted to close the case. During an interview with university police and a representative from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (now known as Human Services), Sandusky said he would not shower with children again.

Two years later, in the fall of 2000, a janitor in Penn State’s Lasch football building told a coworker and supervisor that he saw Sandusky engaged in sexual activity with a boy in the assistant coach’s shower. Fearing for their jobs, neither the janitor nor his coworker filed a report; their supervisor did not file a report, either. “They knew who Sandusky was,” Special Investigative Counsel Louis J. Freeh later said after he completed an eight-month investigation of the scandal in 2012. “They said the university would circle around it. It was like going against the president of the United States. If that’s the culture on the bottom, God help the culture at the top” (Wolverton, 2012).

In 2001, Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in the showers at the Lasch football building. McQueary visited Coach Paterno’s home the next morning to tell the coach what he had witnessed. Paterno, in turn, reported the incident to Athletic Director Curley. It wasn’t until 10 days later, however, that McQueary finally met with Curley and Schultz to describe what he saw.

Initially Curley, Schultz, and Spanier decided to report the incident to the Department of Public Welfare. However, two days later, Curley informed Schultz and Spanier that he had changed his mind after “talking it over with Joe” Paterno. They decided instead to offer Sandusky “professional help” and tell him to stop bringing guests to the locker room (Wolverton, 2012). No report was made to the police or the child protection agency. It was later found that in an email, Spanier told Curley he approved of the athletic director’s decision not to report the incident, calling it a “humane and reasonable way to proceed” (Wolverton, 2012). McQueary, meanwhile, continued to work at Penn State, being promoted to an assistant football coach’s position.

And over the next seven years, Sandusky reportedly kept meeting and sexually assaulting young boys. When Sandusky was finally arrested and charged with 40 counts of sexual abuse in 2011, it was at the end of a three-year investigation launched by that mother’s 2008 phone call. The investigation not only uncovered that Sandusky sexually abused eight boys over a 15-year period, but determined that university leaders, including Spanier and Schultz, knew about the coach’s behavior and did not act. During testimony they gave during the attorney general’s investigation, these same leaders denied knowing about the 1998 and 2001 incidents; but the investigation proved through emails and other documents that university leaders did not truthfully admit what they knew about these incidents and when they knew it.

As a result, Curley and Schultz were charged with perjury and failure to report what they knew of the allegations. While Spanier called Sandusky’s behavior “troubling,” he pledged his unconditional support for both Curley and Schultz, predicting they would be exonerated (Keller, 2012). Two days later, however, Paterno and Spanier were fired by the university’s Board of Trustees, and the board hired Freeh to conduct an independent investigation of the scandal.

Eight months later, Freeh released a scathing 267-page report that detailed how and when university leaders knew about Sandusky’s behavior and stated that they failed to report repeated allegations of child sexual abuse by Sandusky. The report stated that Spanier and Paterno displayed “a total disregard for the safety and welfare of children” and hid critical facts from authorities on the alleged abuses (Wolverton, 2012). The investigation by Freeh found emails and other documents suggesting that Spanier, Paterno, Schultz, and Curley all knew for years about the sexual nature of the accusations against Sandusky and kept these allegations under wraps.

The report stated that Paterno, especially, “was an integral part of the act to conceal” (Keller, 2012). Athletic Director Curley was described in the report as “someone who followed instruction regardless of the consequences and was ‘loyal to a fault.’” One senior official called Curley Paterno’s “errand boy.” And finally, the investigation concluded that Spanier “failed in his duties as president” for “not promptly and fully advising the Board of Trustees about the 1998 and 2001 child-sexual abuse allegations against Sandusky and the subsequent grand jury investigation of him” (Keller, 2012).

But it wasn’t just the university administrators who took fire. The report also cited the university’s Board of Trustees for failing “to exercise its oversight,” stating “the Board did not create a ‘tone at the top’ environment wherein Sandusky and other senior university officials believed they were accountable to it.” Ultimately, Freeh’s report concluded that the reputations of the university and its exalted football program were “more important to its leaders than the safety and welfare of young children” (Keller, 2012). Joe Paterno died in January 2012. Six months later, Sandusky, the assistant coach he protected, was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.

Former Penn State officials Curley, Schultz, and Spanier were all sentenced to jail time for failing to alert authorities of the allegations against Sandusky, allowing him to continue molesting boys for years. A month after Sandusky’s conviction and 10 days after Freeh’s report was released, a much-beloved 7-foot, 900-pound bronze statue of Paterno was removed from its pedestal outside Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, providing symbolic evidence of the failure of Paterno’s “Success With Honor” motto and the public’s faith in Penn State’s program.

Questions

• How would you describe the followership at Penn State? Whom would you identify as the followers? Who are the leaders?

• Using Kelley’s typology, how would you describe the follower styles for Schultz and Curley? What about McQueary?

• How did followers in this case act in ways that contribute to the power of destructive leaders and their goals? What was the debilitating impact their actions had on the organization?

• Based on Lipman-Blumen’s psychological factors that contribute to harmful leadership (Table 13.3), explain why those who could have reported Sandusky’s behaviors chose not to.

• Based on the outcome, where did Paterno’s intentions go wrong? In what ways could followers have changed the moral climate at Penn State?

• In the end, who carries the burden of responsibility regarding the failure of Paterno’s program—the leaders or the followers? Defend your answer