More fun with parsing journalism: Was Joe Paterno actually disappointed hazing isn't harsher?

Someone posted this new Atlantic piece on the hazing death thread (should be a running thread at this point). It's a compelling piece - I listened to the audio during a run this week, which is a fun way to listen to a longer magazine piece. Anyway, it definitely has a point of view, and proceeds from some premises stated as fact. (This jumped out, in a laundry list of the "ritual" that occurs after a fraternity hazing death: "Its most dramatic act will be to shut down the chapter, and the house will stand empty for a time, its legend growing ever more thrilling to students who walk past and talk of a fraternity so off the chain that it killed a guy.") Regardless, it is an important piece of journalism.

Nonetheless, I have an issue with the following paragraph about Joe Paterno, and in particular the bolded last sentence:

In 2007, he gave the practice his implicit endorsement. Photographs had surfaced of some members of the wrestling team apparently being hazed: They were in their underwear with 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to their hands. “What’d they do?” he asked during an open football practice that week. “When I was in college, when you got in a fraternity house, they hazed you. They made you stay up all night and played records until you went nuts, and you woke in the morning and all of a sudden they got you before a tribunal and question you as to whether you have the credentials to be a fraternity brother. I didn’t even know where I was. That was hazing. I don’t know what hazing is today.” He wasn’t upset that the wrestlers had engaged in hazing; he was scornful of them for doing it wrong.

I don't read it that way at all. I don't think Paterno is endorsing hazing. He's saying that what was being reported as "hazing" by the wrestling team was not hazing, in his mind, and then gave an example of what he understood "hazing" to be.

I think she misrepresents Paterno's position, or at least can't write her interpretation as ... wait for it ... an established fact. Paterno wasn't "scornful of them for doing it wrong." He just didn't think that what they did was hazing.

The problem is that she needs Paterno to endorse hazing, because one of the premises that her piece rests upon is that Paterno's role as the dominant figure on the Penn State campus set the tone that eventually led to Tim Piazza's death and other fraternity malfeasance, like the Facebook page of naked, passed out women. (Full disclosure: That was my fraternity, though I didn't go to Penn State.) She also then gets to tie her piece in some way to the bigger Penn State scandal, Jerry Sandusky's reign of terror.

But, again, I just don't think Paterno says what she says he says.

Thoughts?

 

Good lord. Edward 40-Hands is not hazing, it's Thursday night.

 

Paterno was probably just upset there was no butt stuff.

 

He never heard of no rape of no man.

 

No thoughts?

 

It does sort of sound like someone trying to twist a quote towards the narrative they want to tell.

I'd like to know more of that JoePa conversation than just one fricking sentence that is like a short soundbite. Soundbites suck.

 

Man, do I agree with that. Especially a soundbite that I presume she just plucked from an archived story. It's cherry-picked to the extreme. And she didn't even cherry-pick it well - he doesn't say what she argues that he says. But it's the closest she could find.

 

Very good, well-trained historians know not to do shit like that, and journalists ought to know the same.

 

I have two friends who are historians, and both would admit that there are historians who do sh$t like that.

 

He qualified it.

 

Ken Burns has a whole philosophy of it, inspired by Frank Broyles no less!

 

That said, the passage in the Atlantic piece that Dick quotes, and the headline Dick chose for this thread, are not the same.

Paterno was not suggesting the boys be hazed "harsher" as that word does not appear in the piece. That is Dick's interpretation of what Flanagan was implying.

Flanagan interpretive sentence is that Paterno says they were doing it "wrong." Not that it needed to be "harsher." Paterno did not imply that in the quoted passage. He also clearly did not seem offended that hazing existed still, just that he did not recognize it.

The point seems to be that Paterno thought hazing was fine as long as it didn't rise to the level of meanness. He clearly wasn't upset. That seems obvious to me. And I do think if Paterno didn't think hazing, at least in theory, was bad (at least his interpretation of hazing) then of course people at Penn State would use that to justify all kinds of hazing (far worse). I think history has certainly shown that people at Penn State used Paterno's feelings to justify a lot of stuff in the name of tradition.

IMO, you're reading something into it that is not there.