Are we any better? Our previous Provost claimed exemption from the ethics rules so she could serve on the board at NIKE. She is now the President at U. Illinois!
Joe Paterno Advocated Special Treatment For Penn State Football Players: Report
By SEANNA ADCOX 11/22/11 Huffington Post and AP, excerpts
Asked …whether disciplinary cases at Penn State (other than the Sandusky affair)would be reviewed, an NCAA spokeswoman said she had nothing else to say at this time.
A review of Associated Press stories over the last decade shows at least 35 Penn State players faced internal discipline or criminal charges between 2003-09 for a variety of offenses ranging from assault to drunk driving to marijuana possession. One player was acquitted of sexual assault.
Vicky Triponey, who resigned her post as the Penn State University’s standards and conduct officer in 2007, confirmed that she sent a 2005 email to then-president Graham Spanier and others in which she expressed her concerns about how Penn State handled discipline cases involving football players. The Wall Street Journal published excerpts from the email on Tuesday.
Paterno “is insistent he knows best how to discipline his players … and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should NOT be our concern … and I think he was saying we should treat football players different from other students in this regard,” Triponey wrote in the Aug. 12, 2005, email.
“Coach Paterno would rather we NOT inform the public when a football player is found responsible for committing a serious violation of the law and/or our student code,” she wrote, “despite any moral or legal obligation to do so.”
“Many times, (because of) the pressure placed on us by the president or the football coach, eventually, we would end up doing sanctions that were not what another student would’ve got,” she said. “It was much less. It was adapted to try to accommodate the concerns of the coach.”
Curley and Spanier did not reply to messages for comment. A representative for Curley told the Journal that “he tried to make sure all student athletes were treated equally with regard to the code of conduct.”