WSU should aspire to higher level

Could WSU athletic director Bill Moos really be so morally obtuse that he sees no role for the NCAA, the governing body of college sports, to take action against one of its member schools where a promiscuous climate of athletic idolatry allowed a sexual predator to use Penn State facilities to rape and abuse young boys? And what’s this from the Cougars’ new head football coach Mike Leach, who was fired from his previous job at Texas Tech for his treatment of a player with a concussion?  He already has an opinion that “it can’t happen here” without even having read former FBI director Louis Freeh’s grim and thorough report documenting what went wrong at Penn State.

Fortunately, former UW president Mark Emmert, in his laudatory effort to raise college sports to a level where appropriate penalties address serious problems, isn’t taking anything off the table with respect to Penn State’s multilevel failure of leadership. One can only hope that WSU president Elson Floyd will be more attuned to the views of Emmert than to those of Moos and Leach.

A great research university like WSU deserves to be led by administrators and athletic department personnel who understand that its true mission is education, not the glorification of semi-professional football and basketball teams led by overpaid vagabond coaches and athletic department personnel.

Tom Keefe

Spokane