Hugo Schwyzer thinks the underlying disease is the dominance of old boys' networks in American professional life:
Whether they’re found in corporations or athletic departments or churches, Old Boys’ Networks often tend to be characterized by three things: an insistence on intense loyalty to the organization, a disdain for outsiders, and a systematic process by which younger men (but rarely young women) are groomed by older ones for future leadership. If we don’t want more Penn States, we need to do more than opine about accountability. We’ve got to dismantle the Old Boys’ Networks (OBNs). And the most enduring way to dismantle them is for young men to refuse to join in the first place. That’s easy to say—and harder to do.
Nicole Rodgers pushes it further:
These Penn State college football men make up a very powerful club, one with lots of prestige, influence, and money. I’ll add that the Catholic Church—infamous for its own pattern of harboring pedophiles—is also an old boys' club, albeit one of a very different sort. There seems to be something distinctly masculine about the type of cowardice that allows one to prioritize loyalty to powerful institutions and friends over protecting children. Can you imagine this many women knowing or suspecting that a child molester was in their midst and not bringing in the police?
Jason Berry likewise compares Penn State to the Catholic Church.
The Dish 