11th
Good grief, [Joe Paterno] still doesn’t get it. That was the reaction to seeing him at home Wednesday after his dismissal, after 46 seasons as head coach. In front of his house, he did the cranky-old-man bit he has been doing for many years, telling the young scholars to go back to their rooms and study. But he did it without demonstrating a scintilla of gravitas about the horrendous events at Penn State in recent days, or, in fact, the last couple of decades.
The Jerry Sandusky scandal went public in March 2011 when The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., reported an investigation. But nobody wanted to know. The trustees let it fester and Paterno achieved a record 409th victory, and suddenly a mob of scholars is overturning a media van out of some inchoate sense of victimization rather than reading the prosecutor’s presentation about the case. The trustees let journalism do the dirty work.
