(Updates with name removed permanently from award)
By Daniel Lovering
July 17 (Reuters) – The fall from grace of the late
legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno turned into a
plunge on Tuesday.
Days after a blistering report accused Paterno of covering
up the child sex abuse of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky to
shield Penn State’s reputation, Paterno’s alma mater, Brown
University in Providence, R.I., said it stripped his name from
an annual athletic award.
On Penn State’s campus, members of a student group that
manages a rallying spot for the Nittany Lions’ football games
changed the spot’s name from “Paternoville” to “Nittanyville,”
according to a statement by the Nittanyville Coordinating
Committee.
And debate reached a fever pitch over whether to remove a
7-foot (2.1-meter) statue of Paterno outside Beaver Stadium at
Penn State that hails him as the winner of more games than any
other coach in the history of major-college football.
“Take the statue down or we will,” read a banner trailed by
a small plane buzzing over State College, Pa., home of Penn
State, a photograph posted on Twitter showed.
A report released last week by former FBI Director Louis
Freeh accused Paterno and other Pennsylvania State University
officials of failing for 14 years to protect children victimized
by Sandusky.
Sandusky, 68, was arrested in November and convicted last
month of sexually abusing 10 boys over 15 years. He faces up to
373 years in prison.
Brown eliminated a football coaching chair named after
Paterno earlier this year “due to issues that predated the Penn
State matter,” the university said in a statement.
It said his name was removed this spring from an award that
has been given annually since 1991 to an outstanding male
freshman athlete. The yearly honor had been named for Paterno,
who graduated from the Ivy League school in 1950 and was
inducted into the Brown Hall of Fame.
The change was made permanent on Tuesday.
“The director of athletics has now recommended and the
university has approved the decision to remove permanently the
Paterno name from the award,” the university said in a
statement.
Paterno was fired by Penn State’s board in November shortly
after Sandusky’s arrest. He died in January of lung cancer at
age 85. His family, angered by the Freeh report, has said it
will conduct its own probe of the scandal.
(Additional reporting by Joseph O’Leary; Editing by Barbara
Goldberg, Cynthia Osterman and Ciro Scotti)
