The legacy of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno '50 received a major blow Thursday as the findings of an internal investigation implicated him in the cover-up of sexual abuse perpetrated by one of his assistant coaches, Jerry Sandusky.
The report, led by former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Louis Freeh, revealed that Paterno knew about possible inappropriate behavior as early as 1998. It also concluded that he - along with Penn State's former President Graham Spanier, former vice president Gary Schultz and former athletic director Timothy Curley- actively colluded to shield the football program from bad publicity. Curley and Schultz are facing charges of perjury and failing to report the abuse.
Paterno died in January before he was able to speak to investigators, but the details of the report have broad implications for how his time at Penn State will be remembered.
The Freeh report included a description of an incident in February 2001 when Paterno convinced Tim Curley, then Penn State's athletic director, not to report Sandusky to the authorities after Curley expressed his intention to do so. The report concluded that "the failure to protect the February 9, 2001 child victim, or make attempts to identify him, created a dangerous situation for other unknown, unsuspecting young boys who were lured to the
Penn State campus and football games by Sandusky and victimized repeatedly by him."
The scandal erupted in November 2011 when a grand jury indicted Sandusky for abusing young boys from his charitable work. As the controversy evolved and entered the public view, it became clear that abuse had occurred for years and that several officials at Penn State had "repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse from the authorities, the Board of Trustees, Penn State community and the public at large," the report reads.
Immediately following the scandal, many fans and observers insisted Paterno, who had a reputation as a coach of integrity, had not been aware of any misconduct. The recent report casts serious doubt on that possibility.
Freeh said the behavior of Paterno and others at Penn State indicated a "callous and shocking disregard for child victims."
In June, after a heavily publicized trial, Sandusky was convicted on 45 of 48 counts of sexual assault against 10 different boys.
Since Freeh announced the findings of his report, public opinion has turned decidedly against Paterno. At Penn State, where Paterno was once revered as a larger-than-life figure responsible not only for the success of the football team, but also for the school's academic improvement over the past several decades, calls for the removal of a statue of the former coach have spread across the internet and the airwaves.
Brown's Athletic Department has presented the Joseph V. Paterno '50 Award to "an outstanding first-year varsity male athlete" every year since 1992. This past year, the department still conferred the award but suspended the use of Paterno's name, instead calling it by its original name, "the first-year male athlete award." Darlene Crist, the director of news and communications at the University, said the future of the award's name remains uncertain.
After the revelations of the Freeh report, "the University will make a decision about the naming of the award in future years," Crist said.
The Howard D. Williams '17/Joseph V. Paterno '50 Football Coaching Chair was also renamed in the past year, but for reasons that predate the Penn State scandal.
In 1977, Paterno was inducted into the Brown Athletic Hall of Fame. Paterno played football for Brown as an undergraduate and still shares the record for most career interceptions. He went on to an illustrious career as head coach of Penn State's football program, leading the team out of relative obscurity to become one of the powerhouses in the nation. He accumulated a record 409 career victories, along with three Big Ten titles and two national championships, until he was fired in November amidst the controversy surrounding his reaction to the claims of child abuse.
