I’m sure there are many of you dear readers who want me to discuss MU’s move from the Big 12 to the SEC. That is a valid campus issue, but alas, the only things I know about this move are: we moved. Now when people assume Missouri is in the South, they have sports to justify it. The announcement divided the student body and alumni.
Seriously. That’s all I understand about the move.
I grew up with a football-loving family, so I have been exposed to college athletics. When I was younger, Thanksgiving consisted of my grandma’s tasty vegetarian Indian food, Penn State football (my grandfather, uncle and aunt attended the university) and old black-and-white Bollywood movies.
Well, now that I’ve brought up Penn State…
Now I think I have confused the readers — why is she going to write about another school’s football team when she doesn’t grasp MU’s athletic politics?
Well, it’s because I could give zero fucks about any school’s athletics department’s politics, but I do care about sexual abuse. For those who aren’t aware of what’s transpiring at Penn State, here’s a quick summary.
Jerry Sandusky, former assistant coach of PSU’s football program, was indicted Nov. 4 on 40 counts of sex crimes against young boys. There have been reports of Sandusky’s sexual abuse of young men since 2002.
PSU’s athletics director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, Senior Vice President of PSU, have both been charged with failing to report the incident to police and lying to a grand jury regarding what they knew about the incident. Curley has been placed on administrative leave and Schultz was asked to go back into retirement. Along the same vein, the Penn State Board of Trustees formally removed Joe Paterno, the head coach of the PSU football team, and PSU’s president Graham Spanier from their positions. They cannot escape scrutiny as this case unfolds. It has come out that Paterno did not go to police about an incident reported to him.
I am explaining and writing this because I want to encourage everyone associated with the University of Missouri to not be afraid of speaking up. If you see, hear or are told of something that you know is not OK, it is your moral responsibility to do something about it.
For many of us, it can be overwhelming to know whom or what department to talk to. I would suggest talking to RSVP, the Women’s Center, a professor, an adviser, MU Police Department, MU Counseling Center or one of the many other resources available on campus.
The most extreme cases of speaking up can obviously lead to icons leaving their positions “in shame,” but in all cases, there are victims: people who never “asked for it” or wanted to be assaulted.
No one wants to be a victim.
There is one last lesson I want to extract from the PSU sexual assault case. Wednesday night, Paterno was removed from his position. This prompted, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10,000 students to protest his removal.
Some time into the protest, participants turned a news van on its side, changing the nature of the demonstration from a protest to a riot. Keep in mind — these students were mad about his being fired, not the victims.
The victims, whose pain PSU tried so hard to cover up as to not break down the football program, did not receive unified outrage, did they?
As the protest-turned-riot was breaking on Twitter last night, I saw a lot of responses from MU students revealing their disgust with the situation, but it’s really easy to comment from far away.
The real test of a university and its students is how it reacts to events like this. If this happened at MU, would you have joined the protests?