Obscene: Students turned over a TV camera truck while rioting after the ouster of abuse-coddling coach Joe Paterno. (AP)
‘Of course we’re going to riot,” Paul Howard, a 24-year-old student at Penn State, told The New York Times. “What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?”
The coach in question, as we all know, is Joe Paterno, the decades-long patriarch of Penn State football. Paterno was fired by the board of trustees for his part in a reprehensible non-response to the alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy.
You have to wonder what’s wrong with our society when someone can say, “Of course we’re going to riot,” but not over the coverup of pedophiliac rape. Rather, students feel it is their obvious right, perhaps even duty, to throw violent temper tantrums when a multimillionaire football coach is fired, simply because the coach is part of their “college experience.”
Yes, yes: Journalistic niceties require that I say Jerry Sandusky, the longtime assistant coach accused of serial sexual abuse and exploitation of children, hasn’t been proven guilty of anything yet. And that’s true. But it doesn’t exonerate Paterno and other officials.
An eyewitness said he saw Sandusky sodomizing the boy in the shower. Unless officials thought it was a demonstrable lie, they had a moral and legal obligation to contact police. But they didn’t think the witness was lying. They kept him on staff. And they simply barred Sandusky from bringing children to the facility. So once Sandusky was out of sight, his crimes were out of mind.
Obviously, the real horror here is in the alleged criminal conduct. But there’s a larger point to be made here. People keep saying the cover-up proves the corruption of college football. Maybe so.
But what about the riots? These aren’t simply a product of football culture, they’re a product of a campus culture that teaches students they have an absolute right to whatever their hearts desire, starting with a fun-filled college experience and, afterwards, a rewarding career.
Imbued with a sense of victimhood, entitlement and cultivated grievance that can only be taught, their preferred response to inconvenience is a temper tantrum.
The tantrums are always self-justifying. Arguments are correct not if they conform to facts and reason, but if they are passionately held. Unfairness is measured by the intensity of one’s feelings.
Perhaps that’s why a “right to riot” has become a staple of campus culture across the country, particularly at big schools. Students riot when administrators take away their beer. They riot when they lose games. They riot when they win games. They riot when the cops try to break up parties. Inconvenience itself has become outrageous.
It is also why idiotic protests have come to be seen as “part of the college experience,” as if chanting inane slogans and spouting weepy canned platitudes is essential to a well-rounded education.
Most of the time, I find campus protest culture to be shallow and predictable. But I would have cheered it this time around, if only someone rioted for the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky.