Doing Nothing at Penn State

Edmund Burke, the 18^th-century British philosopher, famously wrote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” There have been many examples of this truism throughout history, and perhaps we should change Burke’s “good men” to “good people” to avoid sexist language. This language issue aside, the sex abuse scandal at Penn State University is a very recent example of Burke’s wise saying and admonition.

As has now been thoroughly documented by an investigation initiated by Penn State trustees, the very top academic and athletic administrators at Penn State decided to not to alert legal authorities after becoming aware of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children. These administrators were ostensibly “good men” who decided to do nothing. Their silence allowed Sandusky to have continued access to boys for more than a decade. His victims and their families will have to deal the rest of their lives with the untold damage of these men doing nothing. The good name of Penn State, one of the nation’s great universities, now lies in disgrace.

Because this is a sociology and criminology blog, perhaps I should talk about the sociological and/or criminological significance and implications of the Penn State scandal (although “scandal” is too benign a word for what occurred). But I will leave that to others. Let me say something instead about the moral significance of the scandal by returning to Burke’s famous words. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned as a teenager from the Southern civil rights movement and, especially, from the Vietnam antiwar movement (in which I became old enough to participate) was the need to speak out when governments and individuals were committing evil. There are many ways of speaking out, but speak out we must. If even one person at Penn State had decided not to “do nothing,” many boys would not have been sexually abused.

In the face of evil, either on the interpersonal level or on the societal level, we cannot afford do do nothing. That is the sad but essential lesson we should all take from what happened, and perhaps especially from what did not happen, at Penn State.