Rowe: How can institutional interests be placed above children?

From Erie-

In 2010, I learned that one of my predecessors, the Rt. Rev. Donald Davis, had sexually molested young girls while he was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania. That wrenching experience, and my decision to make the news public, have been much on my mind as I follow the horrifying child-rape scandal that has convulsed Penn State University.

I can't fathom how Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, the university's former president, and other officials apparently justified their decision to place personal and institutional self-interest above the safety of vulnerable children. But it is important to understand their thinking, because, as Pat Howard detailed in Sunday's Erie Times-News, their brand of reasoning is not confined to college football or even to the Catholic Church.

Most institutions prefer to keep their secrets, particularly the damaging ones. Leaders inclined to go public with allegations against a sexual predator, and to confess their institution's culpability in the violation of children, encounter a cadre of lawyers, insurance specialists and other advisers opposed to any more transparency than is absolutely necessary.

Opponents of public confession argue that seemingly honorable acts such as telling the truth and offering to make amends are actually exercises in self-indulgence that burnish the image of the leader at the expense of the institution.

More here-

http://goerie.com/article/20111118/OPINION08/311189995/Rowe%3A-How-can-institutional-interests-be-placed-above-children%3F