The year I graduated from college, 2005, Lehman Brothers was the hottest investment bank on the block. Months before graduation, several of my friends had nervously applied for jobs in the banking sector, and Lehman was the consensus choice among all of the job applicants as the ideal place to work. They explained that Lehman was doing the best job of mixing traditional trading practices with “innovative” new tools. Two of my closest were ecstatic when they learned that they had gotten jobs at Lehman. I was truly happy for them. Little did I know that the “innovative” tools that they were talking about were the CDOs and other mortgage backed securities that helped to get us into the financial mess we’re in now.
The Penn State football team entered into my radar screen several months after I graduated. Homesick in Germany, I tried to follow as many American sports as I could, and I started to read up more about college sports. One of the major story-lines that year was the return of Joe Paterno and Penn State into the elite class of college football teams. After two straight losing seasons, which prompted a flurry of articles in the media asking“is Joe Paterno going to retire” and calls for his resignation, PSU finished the 2005–2006 season with an 11–1 record and ended up being ranked third in the nation.[1] The whole media began fawning over him, lauding the “old-school” virtues of Joe Paterno, who graduated players and was running a “clean” program.[2] Racist assumptions underpinned all of the media coverage – Paterno’s winning season came a year after the resolution of the protracted battle between Maurice Clarett and the NFL, the poster child for entitled, narcissistic football players who left school early in pursuit of fame and fortune.[3] The up-standing, “student-athlete” program that Paterno was running was often mentioned as a counterpoint to attacks on college football.
But there were always signs that problems lurked beneath. There was the casual and dismissive attitude towards sexual harassment charges against an FSU football player. There were the mildly racist comments that we just chalked up to age. Similarly, at Lehman, there had been signs of the impending crash long before it actually did in 2008.
And since then, the lies have been exposed. The institutions have been shown to be morally and economically bankrupt. What’s the most tragic about both of these cases is that they preyed on the hopes and promises of the youth. A football coach uses his prestige and power in the community to draw in troubled youth and rapes them. Lehman drew in the best and brightest of our generation, ran them through the grinder, chewed them up and spit them out, asking them to commit fraudulent acts in the process. The betrayal runs deep. I saw this happen to one of my friends. He was burned out by the end of one year.
If Wikileaks, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party have taught us anything, we’re living in a moment of complete distrust of American institutions. Of course, this distrust of institutions – of governments, of political parties, of universities – is nothing new. Richard Hofstadter has written eloquently about the “paranoid style” of American politics. What does seem different, though, is that ever since Watergate, we now have much more effective tools and the ability to rapidly check and disseminate information to corraborate or debunk these paranoid fantasies. Sometimes these tools fail us, and sometimes they succeed.
What happens to institutions after the fall? We expect change to be instantaneous. Our technologies change at a rapid pace, why can’t institutions? But institutions are more often than not immovable; they are resistant to change. We forget that people’s lives, careers, upbringing, mindsets are tied up in these institutions. They’ve invested and sunk too many resources into the status quo for there to be real incentive for radical change. Moreover, there’s hubris. What galls us most about Wall Street is the complete lack of remorse that they have in the face of this economic crisis.
But we shouldn’t hold out hope for reform. One of the periods I’m most fascinated in is the 1920s. Immediately after the devastation of the First World War, the intellectual validity and legitimacy of Christianity was questioned. Faced with rising attacks from various critics, Christianity changed. It embraced new ideas and more diverse sets of peoples. It modified its theology and outlook. Change was slow, painful, contested, and protracted, but it happened, and certain strands of Christianity survived with a much stronger foundation for the future.
Is this moment that we’re living in enough of a crisis to force these institutions to change? We’ll have to wait and see. But for these institutions to change, it’s going to take a long, protracted, and contentious fight.
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The national title game featured USC vs. Texas, which remains as the best college football game I have ever watched. USC would later have to vacate its season because of Reggie Bush, which would technically mean that PSU was no. 2 that season. ↩
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With, of course, the obligatory immediate celebratory literature about the season. ↩
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Maurice Clarett was the reason I started watching college football. He’s the same age as me. He captivated me – he was that rare athlete that combined speed, ferocity, skill, and attitude. He played offense and defense. And, like all compelling figures, had a dramatic rise, fall, and slow road towards redemption. Knowing what we do about Jim Tressel now,, shouldn’t we re-consider Clarett’s college troubles, to some degree? ↩
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