One of the most famous men in Pennsylvania died on Sunday. Joe Paterno, 85, had been the head coach of the Pennsylvania State University football team for the last 46 years. He was one of the most successful college football coaches ever. To sports fans, he was like one of the gods on Mount Olympus. There is even a statue of him in front of the university stadium.
By making the Penn State Nittany Lions one of the country’s top teams, Paterno made an invaluable contribution to a rural university known at best for its meteorology department. Success on the football field brought in large donations, and the sale of merchandise with the Penn State colors, logo or lion on it raked in the cash and kept tuition low.
A university with such a colossal reputation could not afford any sort of scandal.
One Saturday in 2002, a graduate assistant came to Paterno, saying he’d seen Paterno’s long-time assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, standing behind a boy about 10 years old, both naked, in the team’s shower the previous evening. The graduate assistant made eye contact with Sandusky, got scared and ran away.
The reputation was just too important
Paterno listened to this, but he didn’t call the police. Instead, he waited until the next day, then told his boss, Athletic Director Tim Curley. Curley and the head of campus police conspired to keep silent, with the knowledge and consent of the university president. This conspiracy was illegal, but the university’s reputation was just far too important.
Eventually the scandal came to light. A grand-jury investigation that started in 2008, and ended last November, turned up disturbing details. The jury indicted Sandusky on 40 counts of alleged sexual activity with eight young boys, most of them from a charity he’d established.
Curley told the jury he thought Sandusky had just been “horsing around” with the boy — whom no one has been able to identify or find. Would anyone accept that kind of explanation from a Boy Scout leader or a Catholic priest found in a shower with a 10-year-old boy? The grand jury certainly didn’t.
As word got out to the press, and as Curley and the head of campus police were arrested, the head of the university was forced to resign. Paterno was shown the door as well, in the middle of the football season. The board of trustees felt that anything he said could damage the university’s reputation even further.
The students were angry
Across Pennsylvania, a sense of outrage grew — but not because of what had happened to the children, nor because of the cover-up. It was because the coach had been fired. How dare the university do that! Ten thousand students held a demonstration in support of him.
Clearly, Paterno was the least tainted of anyone involved in this scandal. He did nothing illegal. But the fact that he was so admired and looked up to, particularly by young men, gave him an extra responsibility. You expect someone in that position, who’d worked with Sandusky for 30 years, to lead by example and do the right thing: in this case, to confront Sandusky, find the boy, call the police, and keep an eye on his superiors.
But no. Not only did the crowds not tear down his statue like the one of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad; they reconvened at it for a vigil last weekend, when Paterno was on his deathbed. They say he was a good man. He had taught and inspired people for decades, and he and his wife had donated $3.5 million to build a library on the campus. Paterno said that, in hindsight, he would have handled the situation in 2002 differently.
Now that he’s gone, which is more important: what he did, or what he didn’t do?
