You're speculating about what is, in my opinion, the most interesting part of this story -- why did Paterno allow this to be swept under the rug?
Obviously, cover-ups like this one are distressingly common; we have laws requiring school officials to report sex-abuse allegations because left to their own devices, too many people choose silence. If Sandusky was stealing money, is there any doubt Paterno would have seen to it that he was banned from campus? If McQueary had seen Sandusky punching that boy, rather than sodomizing him, is there any doubt McQueary would have intervened?
Saying there was a grave moral failing here is stating the obvious. It would be nice to think that those involved are reprehensible people, but all the evidence I've seen suggests that all too often, otherwise good people act the same way in similar situations. Why?
I've been thinking about this a lot, because there is so much about the behavior here that simply doesn't make sense.
What I do know is reflected in a phrase that has been repeated a few times in this thread and keeps popping up in my head: "the banality of evil". The phrase itself was coined (I believe) to describe how ordinary people could tolerate monstrous behavior while still thinking of themselves as decent people. And depressingly, it's a close cousin to occam's razor, the theory that the simplest explanation is the most likely.
I can understand why there was an institutional
reluctance to report Jerry Sandusky to the local police in 2002. But since we know that the report of what actually happened wasn't "softened" in any way (the AD and VP knew exactly what McQuery had seen. They are under indictment because of this fact) I cannot for the life of me understand why the report wasn't made. Because while it would have set off a chain of events that would have been highly damaging to the football program and the University, there's no way that it would have been as damaging as covering up the information has turned out to be. And the person who made the decision not to report the allegation (which we know from Grand Jury testimony was President Spanier) had to know this. I mean, he simply had to know this.
So even if we set aside the moral imperative to report the suspected abuse, what could possibly have convinced Spanier that this was the right move to make?
After thinking about it for days, I've come to the depressing conclusion that in 2002, Graham Spanier knew all too well that Sandusky's predatory behavior was an established fact. Penn State had eased Sandusky out of coaching it in 1999 because of it, and perhaps naively assumed that Sandusky's behavior would either change as a result of that investigation or that he simply wasn't their problem any more from a legal perspective. The latter conclusion, while devastating, is the one I keep coming back to, because it's the only thing that ties back to the statement Spanier released right after the indictments were handed down:
With regard to the other presentments, I wish to say that Tim Curley and Gary Schultz have my unconditional support. I have known and worked daily with Tim and Gary for more than 16 years. I have complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations about a former University employee.
But even with this as an explanation for why they acted as they did, there's something missing. Because it's one thing to construct a flimsy legal defense in case you will need it one day. It's quite another to deliberate for days/weeks about how you should handle a serious allegation and decide that using this as a defense is the right move.
So I keep coming back to the fact that Spanier simply had to know that if they reported the allegation from 2002 to the police and kicked off an investigation of Sandusky, it would unravel the institution in a fashion that is very similar to how events played out this week. And the only way for this to be true is if there is evidence that they knew all about Sandusky's predatory behavior well before 2002 and did nothing. And so they made the amoral decision to bury the information. I'm not sure what their end game was - maybe they hoped that Sandusky would move away or simply die before anything came out - but they weren't going to risk blowing up the University by reporting the information. Which makes them all monsters themselves.
I don't exempt Paterno from this analysis. I think he had to have known as well, although he may have deluded himself into thinking that the punishment of sending Sandusky into retirement in 1999 was enough to get him to stop. I can't even begin to understand his mindset here.
As everyone does, I fault McQueary for not stopping the rape of a child when he came upon it. There may be an explanation for why he did not act - I've seen people go catatonic when they are in shock, and he may very well have done this - but it doesn't excuse him. However, he did report it, and then up the chain in explicit detail when Curley and Schultz eventually interviewed him. We will learn in coming weeks why he did not take further actions, which is another inexcusable failure on his part, but it's worth remembering that he is the least powerful person involved, and the only one with no ability to make decisions on behalf of the institution.