Joe Pa sacked, PSU students react

The town of State College, PA was a mess Wednesday night as students and local supporters of Joe Paterno flocked to the streets. Reports of riotous behavior began streaming in shortly after the sun went down and included an instance of a news van being flipped and all of the windows broken out. What these students don't understand is that the punishment handed down to Joe Paterno, in the form of his immediate dismissal as the head coach of the Penn State football team, was completely justified and much less severe than it could have been.

Don't get me wrong, it is a terrible tragedy to lose a coach with such a storied history as Joe Pa, but it is expected in this type of tragedy that some people who were only on the outskirts of the scandal still stand to lose their jobs. What many people with ties to Penn State don't understand is that it wasn't the fault of the trustees; the blame falls on Joe Paterno himself.

According to the Pennsylvania grand jury report, Joe Paterno was informed of the child abuse and molestation in 2002, four years after the investigation later showed the contact between Sandusky and the victims began. To his credit, Joe Pa immediately reported what he was told to the athletic director of Penn State, Tim Curley. The responsibility then fell into Curley's hands and Paterno seemingly did nothing more about the incident. And that's where he went wrong.

Pennsylvania is one of only about a half dozen states in the country where knowledge of child abuse only needs to be reported to a superior. In the rest of the country, it is required by law that anyone with knowledge of child abuse must report it to law enforcement or a child-abuse hotline and failure to do so opens the risk of facing misdemeanor charges and full liability in civil court. In fact, in many states, the law specifically warns that shirking responsibility to a supervisor does not pardon the witness from reporting the abuse to an outside authority. While Joe Pa managed to cover his own ass, and was completely within the child abuse reporting laws of Pennsylvania, in a situation where children as young as eight years old are being sexually abused, just enough isn't good enough.

So yes, people may argue that Joe Paterno did what he was required to do, and was within the confines of the law, but that is not enough. Refusing to "snitch" on a coworker for stealing company pencils is one thing, failing to report the continuous, repeated, and horrifying sexual abuse of elementary school children is another story entirely. A person in a position of authority over a college football team, which regularly deals with high school recruits, should have the wherewithal to understand what needs to be done.

Paterno has been shaping lives for more than half a century and should have had enough conviction to protect the future generations to stand up and put a stop to these atrocities. In his statement regarding his end-of-year resignation (mere hours before trustees voted unanimously to immediately dismiss him), Joe Pa stated that he should have done more to help the children. There is no excuse for not doing everything in his power to report the crimes.

It should be noted, I in no way blame Joe Paterno solely for what happened. Jerry Sandusky is clearly a sick individual and the crimes committed fall on him completely. What I do blame on Joe Paterno, and the entire Penn State athletic department as a whole, is that it took so long for these cruel and disgusting acts to be stopped. Joe Paterno shoulders much of the scrutiny because of his notoriety, but from the first reports of abuse in 1998, everyone who knew about the accusations should have done more to alert authorities and put a stop to Sandusky's activities. Unfortunately for Penn State fans, Joe Paterno was in the middle of a top-to-bottom failure by the entire organization and it cost him his job.