Quote of the day: Yes, sometimes things really are that simple

(Updated below. Link fixed, too.)

Here's Will Bunch on the riots at Penn State last night:

“Of course we’re going to riot. What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?”

-- Paul Howard, 24-year-old Penn State aerospace engineering student, as quoted in the New York Times.

OK, so maybe Paul Howard is no rocket scientist. (Oh wait, actually he is a rocket scientist!)

Heh.

I give Bunch full marks for diagnosing the immediate problem (stunning lack of proportion about both rioting and football programs), but his prescription (dissolving the main campus at University Park and distributing its student population among the 19 commonwealth campuses) is pure fantasy.

It isn't that schools like Penn State are, to continue Bunch's downsizing analogy, too big to fail. It's simply that the phenomenal amounts of money floating around in a college athletics system that not only permits but almost demands dishonesty constitutes -- to return to the banking metaphor again -- a clear moral hazard.

Update: Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention the main point here: Children were raped. Adults knew about it.