Seeking the Soul of Pennsylvania.

Why did the worst sports-related scandal in the history of American higher education happen at Pennsylvania State University and not at: Ohio State, Michigan State, North Carolina State, Florida State, Oklahoma State, Arizona State, or Washington State?

The “Penn State scandal” as defined here is how one man, and the coach of one sports team for godssake, took over an entire university—became the university.  Not sports in general—basketball has never been anything at Penn State—one sport.  And one man: for forty-six years.  The one sport-one man phenomenon is what makes the Penn State scandal unique. No one man and-one sport has ever taken over a university like Joe Paterno and football did. 

Is there something about Pennsylvania that enabled this?

In the beginning some saw Pennsylvania as a utopia.  Voltaire wrote that “that golden age of which men only speak and which has never before existed” had been brought forth by William Penn and the Quakers. Only Massachusetts is reasonable alternative to Pennsylvania as most important in colonial America: Benjamin Franklin, the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress, the Constitution.  Three Pennsylvania cities, York, Philadelphia, and Lancaster served as the capital of the new republic. It is known as the “Keystone State” to this day.

Yet, Pennsylvania has produced only one president, the stupendously forgettable James Buchanan. Massachusetts has John Adams, John Quincy Adams, John F. Kennedy, and (if one counts place of birth) George H.W. Bush. Further, in the last half century only one other Pennsylvanian, William Scranton, has been considered a plausible president.

In higher education Boston has Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern, and Tufts; Philadelphia has Penn, Temple, LaSalle, and Drexel.  Massachusetts has in addition Brandeis, Williams, Amherst, Wellesley, Holy Cross; Pennsylvania has Dickinson, Pittsburgh, Villanova, Bryn Mawr, Carnegie Mellon, Penn State.

Boston became “the hub of the universe;” Philadelphia, the site of the filming of 1984.  

What happened?

Puritan Boston, Quaker Philadelphia, a 1996 book written by Penn sociologist and scion of an old Philadelphia family, Edward Digby Baltzell, made the argument that the divergence of the cities trajectories was foretold by their dominant faiths at founding. Puritanism emphasized an individual’s calling; the Quakers emphasized individual goodness (thus the “city of brotherly love”).  To have a calling is to have a mission in life. Puritanism was in this sense a faith for the ambitious.  It was in the Puritan DNA to achieve, to win.  Not so the Quaker emphasis on goodness:  “Good guys finish last” is a maxim of hard-driving America.  William Scranton succumbed to a Draft-Scranton boomlet in 1964 and reluctantly agreed to be the Republican vice-presidential candidate if offered (the GOP didn’t).  John F. Kennedy ambitiously declared for the presidency in 1960 saying he was against “vice” in any form.

It seems to me that the founding religious differences have their analog in the approaches taken by the two states to higher education—and in the quality of the end product. Massachusetts emphasized private education, Pennsylvania public education. The best schools in each state are private but Harvard and MIT dwarf Penn (nickname "Quakers") and Carnegie Mellon. The largest university in Massachusetts, Boston University, is private, as are five of the top ten. With 45,000 students, the largest university in both states is Penn State, which is far below the quality of either Penn (25,000) or Carnegie Mellon (11,000).

Penn State was not viewed as a utopia in the beginning. What became Orwellian "Happy Valley" began as the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, about as modest and un-ambitious an educational enterprise imaginable. The change to Pennsylvania State College and a classical curriculum in 1874 was too ambitious for Pennsylvanians, for whom an agricultural college was good enough.  Enrollment bottomed out at 64, threatening the existence of whatever the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania/Pennsylvania State College had become.

Voltaire also wrote, "the perfect is the enemy of the good."

In 1950 Joe Paterno, just graduated from Ivy League Brown University, took his first job as an assistant football coach at Penn State College. This was the reaction of Paterno's father:

"For God's sake, what did you go to college for?"


What does football have to do with a college education?  With college?  With education?

Penn State did not even become a university until 1953.

Enrollment was 11,000 in 1953. Its football team was good, stadium capacity was 30,000.  Year-by-year Penn State grew; in 1960 enrollment was 16,000 and a new football stadium sat 46,000.  In 1966 when Joe Paterno became head football coach enrollment was 23,000.

In 1968, and again in 1969, this good university's good football team became perfect, undefeated. And the perfect became the enemy of the good. Penn State became football and Joe Paterno. Joe Paterno became the most popular human being in Pennsylvania.

In 1973 the football team was perfect again and enrollment was 30,000. Stadium capacity was increased to 60,000 in 1976, then to 76,000 two years later. In 1998, the year of Jerry Sandusky's first known alleged child molestation enrollment was 41,000 and the stadium sat 94,000. This year, the year of Sandusky's, Paterno's and the university's fall, Beaver stadium's capacity was 106,000, the second largest stadium in the Western Hemisphere and fourth largest in the world. The Agricultural College of Pennsylvania had come to all of this.

The rise and fall of Pennsylvania State University is not the consequence of ambition. This is a peculiarly Pennsylvanian story: there was no plan, no vision; it is the story of un-ambition. "It just happened" as year-by-year for half a century good Pennsylvanians sold the soul of a good university piece-by-piece to one sport, football, and one man, one good man, Joe Paterno.  Sometimes, good guys finish last.

Image:  American Gothic, painting by Grant Wood (1930).