Cullen Nutt: It’s nearly summer in Zimbabwe, and President Robert Mugabe’s campaign for reelection in 2012 is heating up. State television and radio outlets are said to feature a new song in which Mugabe—three months shy of his 88th birthday—sings about the injustices

State College, home to Penn State University’s main campus, is a sprawling town in the center of Pennsylvania, “three and a half hours from anywhere,” as the locals like to say. Its geographic isolation has a good deal to do with the debacle brought upon the university by the sex-abuse scandal in its legendary football program and, much worse, attempts for many years to cover it up. As most anyone who has followed the news recently knows, Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach who worked under the godlike head coach, Joe Paterno, is accused of sexually abusing young boys whom he met through the charity for at-risk youth he had founded, often bringing the boys onto university property and to football events.

From the time I arrived at Penn State in 1985 to head the English department, the place seemed extravagantly hierarchical and closed off, even for a land-grant university. Its presidents (three in my time) were all obsessed with public relations and cocooned by flatterers. The faculty includes many distinguished members but has always seemed unusually docile in its relations with the higher administration. Joe Paterno, however, was about the most effective supporter of academic seriousness in the whole place and had my admiration. When the renowned poet Czeslaw Milosz visited in 1990, nobody in the higher administration had heard of him or came to his appearances, though he was one of the few Nobel Prize winners to pass through State College.

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