More on why I resigned (reposted from Facebook)

Apparently, people are getting through all 5000 words of that essay and still wondering just why I resigned the Paterno professorship. So I suppose I should make the implicit explicit.

I believed that as of mid-July, I had to resign the chair as a precondition of speaking out about the Sandusky scandal. I didn't think so before the release of the Freeh Report, which is why I went ahead and wrote my NYTimes op-ed last year as the Paterno chair. But after the release of the Freeh Report, and especially Freeh's press conference, I felt that any attempt on my part to criticize that document, or the NCAA sanctions that followed, or the whole bizarre media circus that somehow transformed the Sandusky scandal into the Paterno scandal would be worse than self-defeating if I tried to comment as the Paterno chair. Not only would my comments be dismissed as self-serving; they would be read as the apologetics of a bought-and-paid-for toady. (I see that my essay is being read that way by some people anyway! Just imagine if I hadn't resigned the chair....)

[Update:  think of it this way-- it would be like an Onion headline:  "Professor Whose Position Was Created and Partly Funded by Paterno Family Somehow Finds Ambiguities in Freeh Report, NCAA Sanctions."]