The jury in the Jerry Sandusky spoke loudly, clearly and quickly in convicting the retired Penn State University defensive coordinator on 45 counts of child sexual abuse.
We are glad for justice and salute the jury for its clear-headed, thorough expediency. But this is only Step One in the monumental cleanup necessary from the Penn State/Sandusky sex abuse scandal.
It is time now to look at the administrative handling of this situation. Something else clearly needed to be done as the Sandusky situation was unfolding for a decade or more.
While some of the major players have been removed from that administration, we wonder if that represents everyone who chose to look the other way from this scandal. It's hard to believe that, given how long this atrocity was allowed to subsist. Did administrators knowingly cover all of this up, were they that inept or did they honestly not know.
Either way, it was a complete embarrassment that has done long-term harm to Penn State's reputation beyond the football field. That sort of embarrassment can never be repeated again.
We wonder if the proper safeguards and people are now in place to make the university more capable of handling such atrocities should they occur in the future. We wonder if everyone now in positions of power at Penn State, including the board of trustees, understands how much the school's posture has to change.
We wonder because of the constant chorus we keep hearing about apologies that trustees and others feel are owed the family of late football Coach Joe Paterno, who was dismissed from his job when the scandal became a very public matter last fall.
The trustees don't need to apologize to the Paterno family. We don't need to apologize to the Paterno family.
Jerry Sandusky needs to apologize to the Paterno family, the school's faculty, those in the football family and the hundreds of thousands of Penn State alumni stained by his actions.
His lifetime sentence can't remove that stain. His sentence can't eliminate the pain he caused to his victims. The victims have been living with this since the moment it happened.
It is our view that anyone on the university payroll who knowingly covered this scandal up needs to be held accountable. We find it hard to believe and we hope we are wrong that only those mentioned publicly knew of this trail of sex abuse.
The only thing that can be done must come from the school itself a hard look at its fundamental organizational and administratve structure, who is filling the positions and whether they can assure the Penn State community and the public in general that they will never allow such shame to occur again.
