Team Penn State or Penn State Nation?

One wonders about the team concept and how it translates to the world outside athletics. I have seen students from colleges with team backgrounds confounded in the workplace when they encounter competition from colleagues in the workplace. For all of its Japanese influenced "team building", companies love people with intense individual competitive backgrounds, like wrestling and boxing. Yet from business divisions to military units, the team concept is deeply taught and ingrained in modern society.

Now Penn State. How could this happen? Some of the response was clearly terror. The 28 year old graduate student called his dad; he has been raked for this--most recently by the angry doughty Irish Dowd--but it seems more forgivable to me than to her. He did not uncover or discover this madness; this was already known throughout the athletic program at least. Sandusky had a desert disparagingly named after him! It's much more likely the phone call to his dad was not "I can not believe what I just saw, what should I do?" but rather "It's true! What should I do?". That does not excuse inaction but the known institutional tolerence of it prior to his discovery certainly complicates it.

Nor does modern moral indifference fit, despite the eagerness of the right to make this a national cultural failure. People wept. People considered emergency room visits. Yet people did not consider intervention.

Academic institutions are self consciously isolated. They have their own police forces. Every time the police from the general community comes on campus everyone, rightfully or not, thinks of Chile. Sandusky was a great coach on a great team in a great and isolated university. Did this make it harder to deal with him? Or was this more egocentric?

Strong teams tolerate a lot of diversity but not disloyalty.