The Penn State Riot is an Embarrassment to College Students Everywhere

I know what Dan means, for fucks sake State College rioted at a fucking ARTS FESTIVAL over the summer.

He still doesn’t get the seriousness of the situation nor the impact his lack of action has had on these kids… he is totally clueless!!! There is no remorse nor compassion by anyone @ PSU… SAD, very sad, indeed….

In 2004, when the Red Sox won the world series, a good-sized crowd of us gathered down on Marshall Street and cheered, partied and had a good time with DPS watching and nothing was lit on fire, no cars were flipped or anything.

And I believe I can honestly say I wouldn’t have reacted like the PSU fans. Obviously that’s easier to say from a distance, but I just can’t see how anyone would condone that behavior.

I want to believe that we would say, Boeheim was a great coach, with a great career. But it’s time for it to end because this is unacceptable. Maybe I’m being too rational, but I hope that’s how I would react.

Syracuse is a campus that loves to protest, or at least did in my day – not to say I approved. It always seemed like the student body at SU was looking for an excuse to protest. I’m not being fair, it was never the whole student body, it was always a cadre of special interest groups, usually left-leaning, looking for an excuse to raise a ruckus. Remember the asian kids that were allegedly discriminated against at Denny’s on Erie Blvd? Remember the great Lesbian/CodePink kiss-in at the Pat Buchanan lecture at Hendricks Chapel? Remember the ‘wear jeans’ campaigns for whatever special interest group? Khakis FTW!

And while Syracuse is a campus that loves to protest – a scandal like this affecting boheim would likely generate equally vociferous protest, I think the elements that would manifest themselves on the street would be anti-the accused. I doubt very much that the Syracuse campus would tolerate anyone associated with such a scandal. There would be swift, decisive house cleaning regardless of who it was.

And that’s a good thing.

We love Jim, but it doesn’t go as far as idolatry.

Labor Day Storm – Just partying

hence why I said “at least not during my time here”

I heard Livingstock was good times…aside from the whole riot police thing.

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Student body tore down signs, parking meters, etc. Dunno if they qualifies as riots, but they were damn fun.

Any link to the “80-90%” quote mentioned above?

They give themselves that status because they come into players’ houses and recruit them as “leaders of men.” Paterno doesn’t even coach football anymore (Xs and Os). He is there to be the leader and the face of the program.

With that comes responsibility to go above and beyond the minimum in everything you do. He failed as the face of the program and as the face of the school. He did not exhibit qualities of a leader by passing along the responsibility to others and not doing anything on his own to help.

Most of all, he failed all the boys he could have helped. There is no disputing the fact that PATERNO COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS. He knew, and he did nothing. That is deplorable and indefensible.

And your last point “Firing Paterno does nothing for the victims …” doesn’t hold water either. Putting a murderer in jail does nothing for the victims either – they’re already dead. At least these victims don’t have to see Paterno honored on Saturday with a standing ovation, while knowing that he allowed them to be raped for years without doing anything to stop it.

Rioting for events on the field > rioting for events off the field (especially ones that also involve not reporting child abuse)

I think Gerry has more pull with the community at large than Fine, rather than the way it was with Sandusky.

just wanted to be there and were not passionate about the cause. They were waiting for something to happen and thought it would be cool to be a part of or film and put on youtube.

In 2003, after cutting down the nets, it was a cold night. Syracuse.com had a webcam on Marshall street (maybe they still do) and in 3-minute increments people emptied from bars, danced in the streets and climbed trees, and then back inside after like 40 minutes.

When I was there, Syracuse was something like 10K undergrad. It can’t be much more than that now. Penn State’s main campus has to be, what, 40-50K? Not to say that 10,000 people can’t cause a riot. But the more people you have, the more there’s potential for things to get out of hand.

any school has ever been through something like this. And as we’re saying above, think about if this had happened to Boeheim. Would you feel the same indignation as those kids at Penn St?

In fact, if Paterno was fired unjustly, I know that Jimmy would chime in as he is want to do in these situations. I would be very surprised in this situation if Boeheim said a single word. The correct action was taken. The fact that these kids are rioting is deplorable. I get showing your support, but that does not mean you destroy stuff in the process.

Syracuse would not protest. The love we have for Boeheim is not unconditional. Everyone keeps it in its proper perspective. JB has done good things for Syracuse… made winters bearable… supported the community… and so on.

If anything, we’d be weirder about it. We are programmed to worry about our image so much that we would want his head prematurely out of concern that it would “reflect poorly on the Big EastACC.” And so on.

How could he have not asked any questions after McQueary went to him? It reeks of trying to cover his ass by knowing as little as possible. Not cool, Joe, not cool.

Why are they whining about JoePa and not forming a lynch mob and bumrushing Sandusky’s house?

I think this was the last straw.

You don’t get to control how this goes, Joe. Sorry.

This includes LB Dan Connor.

http://oi43.tinypic.com/34xqiie.jpg

but this seems overboard. No need to harm the XC team, the swim team, the basketball team for the actions of 3 people.

Beaver Stadium averages over 107,000 a game. The cheapest season tickets are 435 dollars. That’s 47 million if every ticket was that cheap (they’re not they go up to 700). Idealistic, but not happening. No school is cutting a program for a couple years and eliminating a hundred million or so.

but if this whole child prostitution ring crap is true, then I could care less what happens to the university.

obviously you felt compelled enough to create a handle, log in, and comment…..sooo

YOU!??!

So you’re doing a candlelight vigil and wearing blue to the game on Saturday. Whoopdie doo…

The problem that I have with that is that it’s all symbolic nonsense (much of our society’s into that useless symbolism for some odd reason today). It costs you nothing to do that…now. But where was the community when kids were being pulled out of schools so that this guy could rape them? Where was the community when police refused to press charges when Sandusky essentially apologized to one of the mothers? Where was the community when the DA refused to press charges? Where was the university when the kid was being raped in the shower? Where was the coach when he allowed this garbage to go on for years? And please don’t even start on the “he didn’t know about it” because several of his comments strongly suggest that he knew it was happening. Paterno couldn’t do anything about it? He wasn’t called “the king of Pennsylvania” for nothing.

And so a lot of people are coming out from the university and the community stating that they knew this was going on. It was an open secret. But hey, you’ll wear blue to the game and hold a vigil tonight. And the guy won 409 games. That’s what’s important in the end, I guess.

And for all your rhetoric, it’s still about you. I truly am glad that I’m not Penn St. Because if my university (Syracuse), a place where I work at, went to school at and followed for years since my childhood ever pulled something like this, I would never wear orange again. But I guess you’d never understand that since it’s all about you, even when all the horrific facts are out.

Paterno was a pope, and you worshipped him like a deity. Ok, whatever, but your blindness caused this to happen. There is a saying" “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.” And that’s exactly what happened at Penn State.

Igm10,

I’m going to keep my response to this thread. This isn’t my blog, I’m just a contributing writer, so I don’t want to take up front page space by responding to one comment on one blog post. I hope this doesn’t take away from my ethos too much.

I don’t think that anywhere in my post, I make the claim that I am “most worried” about our reputations as universities. Obviously, the atrocities committed by Jerry Sandusky should always be the focus of this terrible situation. I’m glad we agree on this. Nothing about the fallout from this should supersede the actual issue.

This is why the riots disturbed me. Students weren’t rioting against Sandusky, at least not primarily. The entire thing seemed based around the firing of Joe Paterno. From what I, and the rest of the country saw, people seemed to be far more concerned about Paterno closing out his career and cementing his legacy, or something, with one more home game. I feel that by letting down all of the victims in this scandal, he lost that right. As author Ernest Bramah said, “a reputation of a thousand years may depend upon the conduct of a single moment.” If the students were going to rally around anyone, it should have been the students. Instead, it was one of the major enablers of the entire ordeal.

I understand that these riots were not perpetrated by the “majority”, and that it was only about 2,000 of the 40,000 students at University Park that were out that night. However, it was these 2,000 who were on television for hours, many of whom were making ridiculous statements. When one student said that he agrees with the actions taken by the Board of Trustees in firing Paterno, he was boo’d by his peers. Whether or not this was an “accurate representation” of Penn State, your reputation is all you have, and this riot went a long way towards damaging that of the school’s student population.

I applaud you all for the good actions taken, i.e. the candle light vigil. I hope that the community over there in State College continues to make the victims the focus, and that the school recovers from this. I’m no Penn State hater, in fact two kids from my hometown, including one of my high school teammates, play for the team.

If you’d like to discuss this more, feel free to tweet at me (@Dan_Lyons76), or you can find my e-mail at the bottom of the page.