Institutional loyalty to a powerful sports culture can override legal duties to protect children.

Evidence

Spanier’s concern about legal liability was justified. He, Curley, and Schultz were charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, and endangering the welfare of children (Wetzel, 2011). They pleaded not guilty to these charges. The trial is on hold while a ruling is being appealed. Why would a respected university president compromise his moral standards, bring harm on the university he was entrusted to guide, and ruin his reputation and career by knowingly violating a federal law designed to protect children from abuse? The Freeh report placed much of the blame on Paterno, a legendary coach who presided over a dominant football culture with its own set of rules to which the university often accommodated when they conflicted. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 583

Categorization

• XREF: Links to vault claims about how organizational culture enables ordinary people to rationalize harmful policy, echoing Cooper’s social-conservatism/authoritarianism threads.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 583