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You have to understand something about Temple University before you can understand how the fall from grace of Bill Cosby affects my alma mater. I attended Temple from 1956 to ’60. At that time, Temple was pretty much a commuter school. Many students took the subway to and from Broad and Columbia to the stretch of concrete that was Temple’s campus. Many of them were from working class families. They left school immediately after classes were over and went to work. Temple was mostly work and very little play. Not much rah, rah, rah or sis, boom, bah! The motto Temple Pride would only have provoked cynicism among us. If you somehow got us to admit the truth, we had an inferiority problem.
I was lucky. My parents didn’t insist that I hold a job while attending Temple, so I was able to get involved at the campus radio station. I became involved broadcasting Temple football, basketball and even baseball the last three years of my college life. Bill Cosby arrived at Temple in the fall of ’60 after I had graduated in June. Although David Brenner was in one of my classes, I never got the chance to meet Cosby. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t come to appreciate his importance to the school. In fact, Cosby became so closely associated with Temple that one could label the years before he arrived as “BC”.
When Cosby became a big star, it had the effect of putting Temple on the map. He became the face of Temple University. The effect on the student body and us grads was amazing. For many of us, gone was the inferiority complex. Maybe our campus was mostly concrete. Maybe our football team was almost historically lousy. But we had Cos. Hey, did you see Cos wearing a Temple sweatshirt on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson? Hell, we were proud to tell folks we were from Temple because we knew their response would be, “Isn’t that where Bill Cosby went to school?”
I remember the first time I took my wife to see Cos. He was doing stand-up inside a tent in Ambler. He ambled out onto the stage wearing a gray Temple sweatshirt and sat down on a stool. And for the next hour and a half, he riffed about life and love. At one point, he got around to discussing his days on the sad sack Temple football team. I didn’t want to be a spoil sport to mention that most of my school’s 21-game losing streak had come before Cosby came to Temple. I knew because the last football game I broadcast at Temple was a disheartening 12-8 loss to Drexel on a rainy Saturday afternoon in ’59. But that wasn’t the point of Cosby’s routine; he had turned heartbreak into compassionate comedy. Cosby was us.
Temple University has come a long way since I graduated and Cosby began his brilliant show business career. Temple Pride is not just a motto, it’s reality. The campus is bustling with energy. There is little resemblance to the gray days when I matriculated. State-of-the-art facilities seem to rise on campus each year. The football team isn’t winning any national championships, but it is no longer a punch line to a joke. The contributions to our national life by Temple graduates is now a matter of record and no longer goes unnoticed. Through the years of Temple’s rise to prominence in our community, Cosby remained an imposing presence.
It almost seemed as if his growth from entertainer to beloved national figure mirrored the school’s own success story. I’m not just referring to Cosby’s considerable financial contributions to Temple. He meant more than that to Temple and those of us who love the school. He stayed close to his roots. Made sure we knew he was rooting us on. Remained a visible reminder of the importance of this urban university to Philadelphia. And now all of that has changed.
If it is true that when we lose our good name, we lose everything, Bill Cosby has lost everything. The ugly accusations of sexual abuse grow, even as this column is being written. Cosby’s presumption of innocence is being overwhelmed by the weight and detail of the accusations. His TV and concert appearances have been cancelled. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was when the cable television outlet, TV Land, removed “The Cosby Show” from its programming. Last week, he severed his official relationship with Temple University and stepped down from the board of trustees. The university was criticized for not forcing Cosby to resign sooner, but I think that is unfair. When one has benefited from an association with someone as much as Temple benefited from Bill Cosby, one doesn’t want to be the first one to bail. That is not indifference to the alleged female victims; it is just an acknowledgement that loyalty should only be cast aside as a last resort.
Understand that this column is not written as a defense of Bill Cosby. I find the statements from the alleged victims compelling in their detail and similarity. The fact that a human being can do good deeds while also doing evil, is something with which we all wrestle. The struggle to understand what has happened is especially difficult for Temple right now.
We’ve lost something.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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