What exactly do you think he controlled as the football coach? Unless you think being a big fund raiser and fan of academics connoted some special powers.
A little nugget on academic resentment of football...
- Thread starter Aoshiro
- Start date
What exactly do you think he controlled as the football coach? Unless you think being a big fund raiser and fan of academics connoted some special powers.
Well you hammered that nail home pretty nicely. There is an underlying jealousy behind the words of some(very few) and it is blatant. This is true of the elite professors at every major institute in the country that have bigtime athletic programs.
May actually happen less @ PSU because he was the best friend this school ever had when it came to a lot more than just football.
It has been said in this thread that he was the sole person responsible for transitioning PSU from a small regional university to what it is today. That implies very powerful influence that goes beyond just being the football coach. That actually implies that he was the most powerful person in SC.
Nope, that's not what was claimed in the thread. Also, no where did anyone state he controlled policy, only that he had a passion for the academics at the school and he convinced others to have the same.
This saga? Joe Paterno was always a football coach, but unlike nearly all coaches, he never forgot that the ideal was for his players to be good students first and he wanted those players to attend a 1st rate academic institution. He leveraged football success to take Penn State from a good regional university to one that was world class by raising hundreds of millions of dollars for academics. When he is said to be "more than a football coach" it speaks not to his power but to his humility. He put Penn State's needs ahead of his own. By nearly every standard, he was grossly underpaid, and yet he set an example by giving millions to a place he came to love. There was a time when he could have had any open coaching job in the country, college or pro, but he chose to stay at Penn State and make it better. Along the way, he had some terrific football teams, won more games than anyone, and he did that without violating NCAA rules. For that, those of us who love Penn State will always hold Joe Paterno in high esteem and honor his name and legacy.
Last edited:
You are confusing power and influence. They are not the same thing. Paterno didn't run the university; he ran the football team. He influenced the trajectory of the university by raising lots of money for academics and pushing the idea that academics always had to come first. He never ordered around anyone outside of the football program.
I think that without Joe's influence, PSU would be more like UMASS - a large state school in the middle of nowhere in a state dominated by an Ivy League school (Penn) and a prestigious tech university (Carnegie-Mellon). Joe and "success with honor" put us on the map.
Hard to make a true apples-to-apples comparison there. YES, college enrollment overall exploded during the time frame, but also compare the growth in the towns themselves.
Can you compare Austin, TX to State College, PA?
Can you compare Phoenix, AZ to State College, PA?
Iowa City? Champaign, IL?
Not sure how many of you drove from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh to State College BEFORE they dramatically improved 322. Or from NY/NEPA before Route 80 was revamped. But for goodness sake, it used to take 4-5 hours to get from the major population areas in PA to State College. U of Texas is in Austin, TX the state capital. Penn State isn't in Harrisburg. State College in 1965? Well, just pick up a "Penn State Then and Now" book. What reason would there have been to go to Penn State over, um, PITT or another state school like Millersville, located in a much more convenient location.
Where does the money come from to pay TOP professors? To increase facilities to do QUALITY research?
How many publications were there back in 1966 compared to 1999? How many PhD's were conferred back in 1966 compared to 1999?
Athletics had gotten out of hand...so says an academic.
Hmmm...athletics had gotten out of hand at PSU. Really?
Out of hand?
Let's look at that notion with respect to PSU for a little bit.
Forty-five years of academic All-Americans. An Afro-American grad rate that is rivaled by no one. An athletic department the always trumpeted and at teams blasted out info to the media info on the academic accomplishments of the university's athletes. A tradition of coaching loyalty -- success not just wins was the measuring stick. A football coach that routinely frustrated long-time fans by making decisions about who played based on academic standing. A campaign known around the world as the Grand Experiment that sought to combine athletics and scholarship. A countrywide reputation of being boring, plain Jane, no nonsense, literally 'uncool' due to an emphasis on academics.
OUT OF HAND I SAY.
BULLSH.
Get with it academia. You are clueless. You wanna see out of hand? Spend some time with the athletic departments in the South. If you think Penn State is out of hand, I suspect you will pass out from circuit overload when you see the athletic factories up close.
What garbage.
I will speak for myself as a high school senior in the mid 60's - I applied to 2 universities that had engineering schools. Pitt and Penn State. Truth be told, I wanted Pitt because it was closer to home (30 miles/50 minute drive vs. 175 miles and ... yes, a nearly 5 hour drive).
Everyday, I thank God that PSU offered me a bit more choice in attending than the other place. I was accepted academically at both, but I was relatively late in the college entrance game. The problem was space in the dorms. Pitt said I could commute. PSU said start at a branch campus or go to UP in June.
UP in June is indescribable for a young kid going away to college.
The real point in this post is that I didn't go to Penn State because of a football team, I went because of an engineering school. Football (and ALL the other collegiate sports contests that I attended) was no more than a diversion from my real purpose for being there.
Now PSU has grown a lot since I set foot on campus in June of 1967. A lot of that growth has been just a natural extension of nationwide academic growth - my tip of the cap to UT-Austin, U of I, ASU, and Iowa.
Pure and simple, Joe Paterno was a gem for this university and knowledgeable administrators were aware of that fact. They used his name, they used his influence and yes they used his football program to get a whole lot more than they could get on their own. And honestly, I think that Joe knew that and he was more than willing to parlay his influence into a benefit for the school.
He was also a fundraiser. And his fundraising responsibilities gave him the uncanny ability to also be a trained PA child welfare official.
Make sense.
Yes he was more - so much more
He was an EDUCATOR (.....who happened to coach football)!!
Many years ago the former president of Oklahoma, George Cross, wrote a book titled “Presidents can’t punt.” In the book he made the point that after WWII it was basically his mission to make OU a football a power. This was due in part to give the state of Oklahoma a source of pride that would dispel the dustbowl image of the state from the Great Depression that was immortalized in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Cross understood the effect of sports in higher education in building a university brand and influencing a state’s image. Paterno mentioned in one his autobiographies that when he was hired by President Eric Walker, Walker sat him down and told Paterno he wanted PSU to be a power in football – basically giving Paterno a mandate to do so. Walker like Cross understood the value of athletics to public institutions like PSU and how athletics can build a brand. So, academics can hate football and sports, but it was those same academics in the form of university presidents, who understood the value of athletics to the morale of a school and its alumni and how athletics can build a school’s image. It is an incontrovertible fact that without football (and thus Paterno) PSU is not where it is today – and neither is Notre Dame, USC, Alabama, Ohio State, etc. While alums take great pride in PSU’s achievements in academics and research, they obviously also take pride in the success (on and off the field) of the athletic department. After all, as Bear Bryant was reported to have said, “It’s kind of hard to rally around a math class.”
That is all true and quite on the mark but I would add there's another, deeper element to what Penn State has done with athletics that deserves attention. I think its pure serendipity that Paterno was involved and at times leading the charge. Take a look at PSU athletics prior to Paterno as Ridge Riley and several others have done. The school was never "built" for high-profile, big-time sports in terms of local culture, geography and history. It was, as we alums often joke, a school in the middle of nowhere and a cow college. More importantly, the people who have worked there over the years tend to be conservative, quiet, even typical PA residents that do not draw attention to themselves. That's how the university operated prior to and during the Paterno era. In fact, I think Joe as a head coach was pure accident and only happened because RIP saw something that others may not have seen -- Paterno liked to do things the right way and would not take a shortcut. Once he became the head coach, he didn't change the athletics culture from conservative, quiet to flashy, glitzy or non-academic. Instead, he continued it but pushed people to seek the ideal which is unattainable in its purest form but a worthy goal nonetheless. That goal was to win both on and off the field in all sports.
If you really want to dig deeper into Penn State's culture, look at how Joe and several other coaches in others sports at PSU from the 50s, 60s and 70s were educated -- a scholar-athlete ideal was part of their life experiences and it was certainly important to them as they ran their programs at Penn State. Take a look at Joe's stint as AD (which he described as awful) and see who was hired during that time - people with Ivy League degrees is a hint.
The scholar-athlete ideal, now tossed into the sandbin of history in the quest for money and donors' favor, was indeed alive at Penn State and one could argue was there before Paterno.
Paterno ran an ideal NCAA program, even if the NCAA is incapable of doing so itself.
