After years of idolizing college and all the surrounding culture, the Michigan State case came as a smarting blow. I’ve never had any particular affinity for Michigan State -- essentially, all I knew about it prior to the case could be summed up in two points: it’s a college, and it exists. But after reading story after story about Larry Nassar’s abuse of over 150 women, it became clear that Michigan State wasn’t some special case of neglect or corruption like I’d hoped. It’s far from the first time that a college has covered up a serious assault case, but this one -- maybe because of the sheer scale, maybe because I’m about to enter college myself -- seemed particularly glaring. It’s not just a few corrupt people in high-ranking positions; it’s a symptom of a very flawed system.
No matter how well-intentioned they may be, colleges simply do not have the incentive to care. They are expected to function like a miniature government, with their own police and review boards and disciplinary measures, but, at every level, it’s accountable not to the people its sworn to serve and protect, but to the university. And the institution itself has more stock in seeming stable and appealing than administering justice. Image is everything in attracting paying applicants, and it’s more beneficial to colleges to hide negative incidents behind red tape and preserve that pretty picture than actually sift through some of the murk that goes on underneath that ideal facade.
It’s hardly just a problem with colleges, either. So many times it’s easier to sweep problems -- both other people’s and our own -- under the rug, keep them from our consciousness. The human mind is lazy by design, an attribute that has helped us plenty over the years, pushing us toward our innovative nature. But that also means that the brain, on the whole, looks for easy solutions. If there are none in sight, the closest thing is often to simply pretend the problem doesn’t exist, by extension eliminating the need to solve it. This sort of thinking has created a culture of silence around all kinds of deep-seated rot, from pervasive sexual assault to discrimination to essentially all other forms of abuse. Problems that can be more easily overlooked than solved tend to be minimized, ignored, or flat-out denied.
The Michigan State case is nothing more than this principle on a massive scale: an administration finding it easier to make a problem disappear than fix it. And given how prevalent this mentality is in everyday life, it’s hard to imagine that Michigan State is alone.
