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Once Ubiquitous on Campus, ‘Paterno’ Is No Longer Uttered

There are fewer flowers and signs at the former site of the Joe Paterno statue, which was taken down in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.Credit...Patrick Smith/Getty Images

Every week now there are fewer flowers on the berm where Joe Paterno’s statue once stood outside the football stadium at Penn State. When the statue came down in July, 12 days after a scathing report accused Paterno and top administrators of covering up the early signs of Jerry Sandusky’s crimes, flowers marking the site grew into a mound several feet high.

The plastic-wrapped roses, violets and carnations are mostly gone or withered. The berm itself has been sloped and manicured to blend in, not to call attention to the statue that used to be there.

Make no mistake, Penn State will not forget Joe Paterno; many in State College, Pa., would still consider it a privilege to stand the disgraced statue in their backyards. But as the football team was ending it first postscandal season this weekend, Paterno had noticeably retreated as the emblem of a campus.

In the Penn State community these days, if you ask people to talk about Paterno — to re-examine his decisions, to retrace his successes and failures, to rethink his motives and behavior — the response is increasingly no response. The topic once on everyone’s mind is no longer on everyone’s lips.

If there is a consensus, or a most common response to a reporter seeking further reflection on, or examination of, the once legendary coach, it is this: Penn State is moving on without Joe Paterno. Not un-remembering him, just not summoning him, or his contested meaning, very much.

The onetime king of Pennsylvania is like the statue that represented him: stored away, out of sight and, if not totally out of mind, in a dark recess waiting for an ultimate fate to be determined.

“Some people at Penn State still want to discuss every detail — what did Joe know and when,” said Christian M. M. Brady, dean of the Penn State Schreyer Honors College. “But most here are done with that. They are tired of it. There is compassion for Jerry Sandusky’s victims and a passion to raise our awareness. There is a fatigue for the rest of it.”

Larry Backer, head of the university’s faculty senate, conceded that in recent months, positions in the Paterno debate had hardened, changing the discourse. Paterno is still a saint to many in a region known as Happy Valley, and he is a sinner to others in the same community.

People know which side of the debate they stand on, and minds are made up. What is the point of discussing it?

“So there hasn’t been much talk about the former coach at all,” Backer said, choosing, in a first reference at least, not to use Paterno’s name.

Paul B. Harvey, head of the classics and ancient Mediterranean studies department, interacted with Paterno over several years because Paterno and his wife, Sue, financed multiple undergraduate scholarships in his department. Harvey now rarely recounts his dealings with the Paternos.

“People have stopped talking about Joe Paterno here because they are indeed ready to do just that — to move forward, to move on,” Harvey said. “But we’ve been told that when our students leave campus to interview at graduate schools or for jobs in the marketplace, they feel it is necessary to bring the scandal up even if it wasn’t brought up by the person interviewing them. That is telling on the grander scale.”

At Penn State, the Paterno T-shirts that were once big sellers and prominently displayed in the windows of crowded apparel shops on College Avenue are now at the back of the store, and Paterno-themed souvenirs are far from the front-line attractions they once were.

The investigation of Penn State’s handling of Sandusky, led by Louis J. Freeh, the former head of the F.B.I. and a onetime federal judge, damned Paterno and other senior university officials, as well as the “football first” culture that suffused the university. Paterno had not only failed to act to stop Sandusky from sexually abusing children, the investigation found, but had actively worked to hide his crimes.

“He’s gone, and I’m sorry about that,” Harvey said of Paterno. “But we are not resurrecting the nuances and details of the case any longer. We know the harm that was caused, and no one shies from that. But there’s also sympathy for the Paterno family. Discussing it — bringing him up again and again — is only making it harder on them.”

During interviews in recent weeks, Paterno’s associates, former co-workers and players — as well as alumni and his coaching brethren — were given a chance to discuss whether, in retrospect, there were qualities Paterno ever exhibited that might help make sense of his dealings with Sandusky. However, there was an almost universal disinclination to revive the man’s actions or be quoted on the record about him.

Leave him be, they said. He has departed, and with him went the curiosity about his actions. Death had made it easier to not look back on a life.

People occasionally told stories that may have been revealing, but few offered anything like an explanation. Paterno often bullied or manipulated aides, reporters and boosters, they said. Over time, he grew preoccupied with controlling everything within the Penn State football sphere, hence the public 2007 spat with Vicky Triponey, the former Penn State vice president for student affairs who wanted a role in disciplining football players for off-the-field transgressions. There were documented episodes of odd behavior, especially after he turned 75.

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The berm where Joe Paterno’s statue once stood was manicured to blend in so as not to draw attention to it.Credit...Nabil K. Mark/Centre Daily Times, via Associated Press

Some people saw Paterno’s conduct as indicative of his domineering style and overprotective attitude toward the football program. Others said they were the acts of a cranky old man who had a reputation for being irritable even when he was not old.

“There have always been Paterno haters,” said Lou Prato, Penn State’s best-known football historian. “The scandal only gives them more ammunition. It gives them something to run with bit by bit.”

And there is the potential for more ammunition to come.

On campus, there is a sense that the coming trials of the former president Graham B. Spanier, the athletic director Tim Curley and the university administrator Gary Schultz might prove to be the central examination of what Paterno knew and when, providing insight into his motives as well. At the same time, his many supporters hope the judicial proceedings will become the vindication of their hero. And some in the administration cling to the dream that a series of not-guilty verdicts could foster a period of reclamation for the institution’s reputation.

But just as many people at Penn State, perhaps a majority on campus, will greet the approaching trials without any enthusiasm. To them, the tragedies of the scandal endure. The trials are just another bleak chapter.

And while Paterno is on trial in some manner, he obviously is not charged, and never was. Most apparent to all, those being prosecuted did not engender civic pride since the mid-1960s. They are not Joe Paterno.

As Harvey said, “Interestingly, in all of this there is very little sympathy for Spanier, Curley and Schultz.”

Backer, who is a professor of law, said that the Penn State community may be in a stage of limbo.

“It is possible we are a long way from being done with the narrative of Jerry Sandusky,” Backer said. “The trials of the former president and other officials may nudge out different views and details that change the discussion. It could be the jab that opens up the whole thing again.”

Al Harris, a linebacker for Paterno in the early 1980s, has been asked repeatedly in the last year to explain the football coach he knew. A dentist in New Jersey, Harris gets the question all the time, from patients, colleagues and parents of patients.

He is tempted to tell stories that still make him laugh, recalling, for example, when Paterno would charge across the practice field, his high-pitched voice squealing reprimands.

“The veins would be popping out of his neck, and he’d be so angry the words would sputter out without meaning,” Harris said. “It was comical. We would have to turn away to keep from laughing in his face. But he also had a way of knowing everything about you that got your attention.

“I remember him yelling at one player: ‘Your mother’s a lawyer and your father’s a doctor, but you’re an idiot.’ And that was a two-time all-American.”

But Harris has had a difficult time talking about Paterno in the previous year, despite the number of times he has been asked to do it.

“I think I went through the cycle of emotions as you do with any trauma,” he said. “First you deny it. Then you’re angry. Then you accept it. I still view him as a valuable, essential life coach.”

Steve Manuel, a public relations lecturer at Penn State and a former spokesman for the Pentagon, is often asked to address groups about crisis communications. This month, a monthly forum sponsored by the Penn State faculty and staff asked him to speak. It was near the anniversary of Sandusky’s arrest.

“I figured they wanted me to say something about the university’s crisis handling — about Sandusky, Paterno, the whole thing,” Manuel said last week. “And they said, ‘No, everyone is tired of that.’ People don’t want to bring it up.”

Backer, the faculty senate leader, noticed as he watched Penn State football games on television this year that even the analysts working the games do not utter Paterno’s name.

“If you had coached a team successfully for 40-plus years and then died, do you think your name would come up at least a few times when your team played on TV the next season?” Backer said. “Normally, it would probably come up often. That it does not now suggests the importance and complexity of the circumstances.

“But if you listen closely, it stands out. People are very careful not to speak his name.”

As on the site of the Paterno statue, what is missing is what is noticeable. At a berm where the flowery tributes dwindle with time, a famous presence diminishes.

“Only Joe’s ghost remains,” Backer said. “It’s just not mentioned.”

A correction was made on 
Dec. 2, 2012

A picture credit with an article last Sunday about the fading presence of the football coach Joe Paterno as an emblem of Penn State misspelled the given name of the photographer. Nabil K. Mark, not Mabil, took the picture of the berm where the statue of Paterno once stood on campus.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SP, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Ubiquitous on Campus, ‘Paterno’ Is No Longer Uttered. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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