In too many cases, that's exactly what it is. Campus Follies.
You get too many crimes showing up in a university's stats, and parents decide to send their kids elseplace. A university gets a bad rep, the reputation of being a 'dirty' campus crime-wise, and the enrollments start drying up. And more importantly, so does recruiting for ... The Great God Football and other sports.
And if that happens, alumni donations start drying up.
So it isn't about doing what's right on America's college campuses. It's about what brings in the money. The bottom line is the bottom line.
Here ya go:
Campus law enforcement largely autonomous
Some excerpts:
The Penn State police did investigate a complaint in 1998 about Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach who was charged last week with sexually abusing eight boys, and turned it over to the district attorney, who declined to prosecute.
But many serious offenses reach neither campus police officers nor their off-campus counterparts because they are directly funneled to administrators. That is what happened at Penn State in 2002, according to a grand jury report, when a graduate assistant to Paterno reported that he saw Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the locker-room showers.
Can you just imagine those administrators getting that report? The vapor-locking would have sounded like figurative corks popping all over Happy Valley.
Alison Kiss, the executive director of Security on Campus, a national watchdog group in Wayne, Pa., praised campus police forces for strides made since the law was enacted. But when a university culture demands silence, she added, the campus police come under great pressure to follow suit.
“Most want to do the right thing, but it’s very difficult when you’re not supported,” she said.
Kiss has dealt for years with complaints of sexual assault against football players at big sports schools.
Yep.
Football. The great reservoir of all-American values. Win at any cost, and if it involves covering up a Great Coach's complicity in a pedophile anally raping a ten year old in the showers ... why, that's just part of the cost of doing business.
