Does Penn State assistant have whistle-blower status?
A. Isaac 
How has Mike McQueary kept his job? That seems to be the question everyone’s been asking the last few days as dominoes continue to fall in Penn State’s administration. His superiors, Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier are gone, and it’s a good bet that most of the coaching staff will be shoved out of the door at season’s end—politely of course.
But McQueary? If not for some rather well-timed and somewhat conspicuous threats the last 24 hours, he’d be on the sideline Saturday.
There have been rumblings that McQueary has more information in the case, information that hasn’t been released yet. There have also been rumblings that McQueary may indeed have federal whistle-blower status, contrary to what experts have stated the last few days.
But Stephen Kohn, the executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center in Washington, D.C., believes reporting the incident to Paterno alone could be enough to protect McQueary under the state’s whistle-blower law.
“If they were to fire him because he made the disclosure and reported it, then he would be protected,” Kohn said. “Just because he’s unpopular, just because people blame him for having the head coach dismissed, he can’t be fired for any of that.”
That makes a lot of sense because, in the face of intense media scrutiny, the Board of Trustees has ushered out some prominent figures with the lowly McQueary still standing.
So we’ll wait and see what happens in the trial and if indeed, McQueary was protected. If not, then Penn State’s character will come into question–again.
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