“Unfathomable.”
That is the word Graham B. Spanier, the ousted Pennsylvania State University president, chose to use in response to the charge that he knowingly overlooked the crimes of a child predator in his midst. The allegation defies logic, he argued in a July letter to Penn State trustees, because Mr. Spanier has devoted his scholarly and professional life to studying the welfare of children, and is also a victim of abuse.
How, Mr. Spanier has asked rhetorically, could a child and family therapist spend an academic career studying children and then show such wanton disregard for their safety? It is a reasonable question that invites an exploration of Mr. Spanier’s scholarship and history as a counselor.
An independent report, released in July, contends that Mr. Spanier and other Penn State administrators sought to “conceal” the crimes of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach convicted in June on 45 counts related to child sex abuse.
Unlike two of his former Penn State lieutenants, Mr. Spanier has not been charged with a crime for failing to report abuse or lying to a grand jury. Nonetheless, the former president has mounted a public defense that emphasizes his academic and personal history.
“I’ve never met anyone who has had a higher level of awareness about such issues than I have had,” Mr. Spanier, who declined to comment for this story, told ABC News in August.
Mr. Spanier’s defense has prompted renewed focus on his scholarship, as reporters and bloggers scour journal articles and books that had previously been of passing intrigue to few outside of academe. What the publications reveal is a man whose fleeting interests in human sexuality led to a broader and sometimes pessimistic exploration of the state of the American family.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Spanier’s writings on “swingers” or “mate swappers” have sparked mostly prurient attention, and some conservative critics have latched onto the work as evidence of Mr. Spanier’s flawed moral compass. Largely unnoticed, however, is a 1975 study of premarital sexual behavior that provides a window into Mr. Spanier’s early views on how young children would interpret sexual abuse. Mr. Spanier began researching the issue while he was a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, where he earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1973.
The article, “Sexualization and Premarital Sexual Behavior,” examined several variables, including abuse, that might compel a person to have sex before marriage. The paper served as a retort to critics of formalized sex-education programs, which Mr. Spanier found to have no direct link to premarital sex patterns.
Mr. Spanier concluded that sexual abuse before the age of 12 or 13 would have no influence on premarital sexual behavior, because genital touching would be “interpreted by the child as tickling or playing, whether pleasurable or not.”
Mr. Sandusky’s victims, who were all boys, ranged in age from 8 to 17, according to prosecutors.
In the context of recent events, Mr. Spanier’s assertion that young children might interpret sex acts as “playing” carries a distinct irony. After an assistant football coach saw Mr. Sandusky raping a boy in a Penn State locker room in 2001, Mr. Spanier said he was told only that there had been some “horseplay.”
“I didn’t conjure up ... anything more than throwing water or snapping towels,” Mr. Spanier told ABC.
Young children may not understand sexual experiences, but they know enough not to talk about them, Mr. Spanier surmised in his research.
“Children probably pick up cues from adults about sex play which inform the children that it should be concealed,” Mr. Spanier wrote.
Mr. Spanier’s 1975 paper only examined sexual abuse in girls, not boys. But Mr. Spanier was working with a national data set, so he did not choose which variables would be examined, according to a person familiar with his research.
It was not uncommon during the 1970s to overlook the abuse of boys in a sociological analysis, according to Roger W. Libby, an adjunct professor and distinguished lecturer at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
“The approach was myopic, because nobody thought about abuse of boys, but of course it happens,” said Mr. Libby, a sex therapist who was acquainted with Mr. Spanier decades ago through professional associations.
The mind-set Mr. Libby describes has an eerie ring to it now. Joe Paterno, the Nittany Lions football coach whose legacy was tarnished by the sex-abuse scandal, said in an interview just before his death, in January, that male rape was simply not on his radar.
“I never heard of, of, rape and a man,” he told The Washington Post.
Defining ‘Deviance’
When Mr. Spanier testified before the grand jury last year, he said he had no inkling that the attorney general was engaged in a broad probe of Mr. Sandusky’s serial molestations. But the questions Mr. Spanier was asked quickly turned from routine to explicit, he told The New Yorker in August.
Mr. Spanier said he remembered being asked something along the lines of, “Did I approve of sodomy?”
Absurd as the question may sound, it’s one Mr. Spanier engaged with as a scholar, however obliquely. In Human Sexuality in a Changing Society (Burgess Publishing Company, 1979), Mr. Spanier posited that a true “sexual revolution” could only be said to have occurred when a society embraced the rights of couples to engage in all sorts of sexual behavior without judgment. But he drew a line in the sand on rape.
In a post-sexual revolutionary environment, Mr. Spanier wrote, all forms of sex would be acceptable, so long as “it involves mutual consent but not coercion, violence, or physical aggression.”
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Spanier explored sexual practices that some would consider morally questionable. His papers on “mate swapping” plunged the depths of a small subculture of swingers in the Midwest. A survey of 287 men and 292 women found that fewer than 2 percent said they had engaged in mate swapping, but about 7 percent said they would consider it.
As sociologists, Mr. Spanier and his co-author, Charles L. Cole, a former professor at Denison University, take no position on the morality of mate swapping. They do assert, however, that sexual deviance is in the eye of the beholder. Mr. Spanier expounded on that theme in Human Sexuality.
“I would contend, as would many other sociologists, that there is a fine line between what is deviant and what is normal, and that behavior becomes deviant only when labeled as such,” Mr. Spanier wrote. “Thus, deviance is socially defined.”
As tolerant and open-minded as Mr. Spanier appears in his writings, he came off as straight-laced to others in the sex-studies field, which he moved away from rather early in his career.
“He was kind of conservative, kind of repressed,” Mr. Libby said. “I don’t know if he was religious, but I kind of always thought he must be.”
Abusive Father
Mr. Spanier’s publications principally focus on the quality and stability of marriages over time, and child abuse was not an issue he probed in any depth. To the extent that he wrote about abuse, Mr. Spanier served as his own subject.
Writing about his father in 1989, Mr. Spanier described Fritz Otto Spanier as a miserable man prone to fits of rage.
“His marriage was dismal, his family life was decidedly unhappy, and his abusive behavior toward his wife and children, tolerated in the 1950s, would have resulted in legal intervention today,” Mr. Spanier wrote in “Bequeathing Family Continuity.”
The abuse, which Mr. Spanier described as “massive and persistent” in his July letter to Penn State trustees, was physical, not sexual.
Mr. Spanier’s colleagues cite his own abuse, and his work as a therapist, as legitimate reasons for doubting that he could ever turn a blind eye to a child predator.
“He was sensitive to such matters. He was trained in such matters, and I would say he was schooled in such matters by his own” father, said Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., who wrote a book with Mr. Spanier.
“I’m utterly convinced Graham did not know specifics” about Mr. Sandusky’s abuse, Mr. Furstenberg added. “I trust him on that matter, and I think he may be vindicated on that matter.”
Mr. Furstenberg, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said Mr. Spanier was “regarded as a major figure in family studies.” At the same time, the professor said, Mr. Spanier knew his limits as a scholar.
“He was, I think by his own observation, someone who would be a star, but perhaps not a superstar,” Mr. Furstenberg said. Mr. Spanier was “imaginative, but not visionary,” he added.
The Therapist
Mr. Spanier’s work as a therapist was limited to counseling couples with marital problems, and he would not have worked directly with children in that context, according to a person familiar with his practice.
Mr. Spanier never practiced full time, but he carried an average caseload of four to six clients between 1973 and 1982, the source said.
For nearly 40 years, Mr. Spanier has been a clinical member and fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. The association, which represents more than 50,000 therapists in the United States and Canada, sets educational guidelines for therapists and publishes a set of minimum “core competencies” that all therapists should have.
Licensed therapists are required to “report information to appropriate authorities as required by law,” according to the association. Mr. Spanier would likely argue that he did not violate this standard, because he says he never learned of a crime to report, only “horseplay.”
Richard M. Lerner, who wrote two books with Mr. Spanier, said the former Penn State president’s experience lends credibility to his version of events.
“It’s hard to study young people and not care about what you’re studying,” said Mr. Lerner, director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University and interim chair of the Department of Child Development. “It’s not like you’re studying a carbon molecule. You’re studying a person.”
“I believe that if Graham knew that there was abuse, he would have acted on it,” Mr. Lerner added. “That’s what I believe.”