And So Ends Another Year in the Real World

Hallie Bateman, an artist I have known since she and my daughter played “pretend” together as grammar schoolers, once drew a cartoon aimed at graduating seniors. “Don’t be scared to enter ‘the real world,’” it tells them. “You’ve been in it the whole time.”

Ain’t that the truth?

The idea of the university as Ivory Tower, as bubble, as rarified space, impervious to the malign forces of the outside world, exerts a stubborn hold on the popular imagination. But it has always been the ideal, never the real. (Think of the 14th century monks gone wild in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.”)  

Here at the modern American university, as elsewhere in our society, are schemers and backstabbers, competition and pressure, anxiety and depression, suicide and assault.

Just this week, a journalism student asked if she could interview me for a report on my colleague Ron Bettig, whose body was found at the bottom of a quarry last August.

George Ishler Jr., 39, of Pennsylvania Furnace, is accused of luring Ron to the quarry and pushing him in as part of a plot to claim his inheritance. Danelle Geier, 32, of Lemont, has been charged with conspiring with Ishler. The case is awaiting trial.

The timing of my interview with the student got me thinking about the grim arc of the waning 2016-17 academic year. This is the last week of spring semester. Ron Bettig died a few days before the start of Fall ‘16. A few weeks into Spring ‘17 was when Penn State student Timothy Piazza also died of injuries sustained in a fall. This case, too, may result in criminal charges.

What is known is that Piazza was pledging for the Beta Theta Pi fraternity on campus, that he had been drinking, that he fell down a flight of stairs, and that 12 hours elapsed before any of his “brothers” bestirred himself to call for help.

Piazza’s death focused attention yet again on blackout drinking, on hazing and on frat houses as places where a lot of irresponsible if not criminal behavior occurs. As so often happens, it has taken a preventable death to galvanize the authorities into action. Penn State President Eric Barron has threatened the once unthinkable: the end of Greek life as we know it if the frat boys don’t straighten up and fly right.

Among the restrictions already imposed, the one that got everyone’s attention was a reduction in the number of bacchanals from 45 to 10 per semester. Forty-five! That was three boozy bashes per week. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

As one who lived among them for 16 raucous years, I would not be at all sorry to see these stately mansions more nobly repurposed.

For my final exhibit in support of Hallie Bateman’s real-world thesis, I give you the latest turn of the Sandusky screw. Former President Graham Spanier, he of the $600,000 per annum salary, was convicted of child endangerment in March. His underlings, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and former Senior Vice President Gary Schultz, each pleaded guilty to the same charge.

Last weekend, I heard from a disgruntled reader who thought that I, who live in the glass house that is Penn State, should not throw stones. (I was pelting the eminently deserving Bill O’Reilly, fired from Fox News last week when advertisers, apprised of all the sexual harassment claims he had settled over the years, began giving his show the kryptonite treatment.)

Like so many before him, my correspondent seemed to be pinning responsibility for the Sandusky scandal on all 60,000 of us who work or study at the University Park campus.

Presumably that would include those who arrived on campus after Sandusky retired and had never heard of him until he was indicted by a grand jury in 2011.

I, who have been around here since the mid-‘90s, knew who Sandusky was but never met him. If there were whispers about his forcing himself on young boys, I never heard them.

One could make the argument that there was a culture at Penn State that ignored the whispers. I’m inclined to agree, but not all of us were part of that culture. If one of my neighbors is arrested for dealing drugs, does that make me a drug dealer or an apologist for drug dealing? Does it disqualify me from speaking out about other kinds of wrongdoing?

The larger point is, this is a small city – an odd little burg, to be sure, but a city nonetheless, with a variety of subcultures and social problems.  

During a good year we are able to focus on the glories of collegiate life: on those among us and those who visit us who enlighten, inspire and entertain through their research, their service, their talent, their wisdom or their courage.

There was much that was glorious here at Dear Old State this year, but the grim stuff, the “real-world” stuff obtruded, as it always will.