Unlearning Liberty by Greg Lukianoff

Author:Greg Lukianoff [Lukianoff, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594037337
Publisher: Encounter Books

Colleges Need to Teach Students to Question Authority,

if Only for Their Own Good:

The Penn State Child Rape Scandal

The examples we’ve seen in this section all demonstrate negative lessons that college administrators are teaching a generation of students. Punishing students for questioning authority is probably also the starkest example of how students unlearn liberty. “You’d better watch your mouth if you have anything critical to say about how things are run here, son” is not the lesson you want to give to people who are supposed to be active participants in a gigantic democracy. Colleges need to teach, both in class and by example, the exact opposite of this lesson. They should be asking students for feedback; they should be able to handle harsh criticism; and they should recognize that it is often only through these mechanisms that universities learn the sometimes ugly truths they desperately need to know. Empowering students to question everything, even the administration, may make administrators’ lives harder, but it’s what you need to do if you want to educate a free people as opposed to an obedient one.

One horrifying example illustrates why universities must create a culture that instills in its members the intellectual and moral habit of questioning authority. On November 4, 2011, former Pennsylvania State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was indicted on forty counts of sex crimes against underage boys—some of which took place on Penn State property.66 Another assistant coach, Mike McQueary, allegedly witnessed one of the assaults in 2002 and reported it to Joe Paterno, the head coach.67 After informing the athletic director, Tim Curley, about the allegation, Paterno never mentioned it again.68 Curley and his supervisor, Gary Schultz, responded by restricting Sandusky’s access to campus, but chose not to report the incident to law enforcement—a decision approved by Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier.69 A concerned parent finally brought Sandusky’s actions to the police; in the resulting investigation, Curley and Schultz were charged with perjury and failure to notify authorities of the alleged assault.70

What kind of campus culture leads five separate individuals to remain silent in the face of such grave accusations? As the details of the incident trickled upward through the Penn State administration, not a single member of the university staff took a potential child rape case to the police. Paterno acknowledged that “[i]t was obvious that [McQueary] was distraught over what he saw,” but he justified his own inaction with that age-old defense: “I did what I was supposed to.”71 He and McQueary saw the ineffectual choices of their superiors, yet chose not to question their authority. In doing so, they let a potential child molester remain free for years. Sandusky’s indictment lists counts of child molestation dating to 2009—a full seven years after the incident that McQueary allegedly witnessed.

Had Penn State worked to create a different culture on campus, one where people felt comfortable telling hard truths and making their own ethical decisions, these five individuals, and possibly others who may have known, might have chosen to take meaningful action.

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