Opinions on JoePa

Since the death of Penn State Football Coach Joe Paterno, I’ve been periodically scanning the web for an opinion piece on the man’s legacy.

This was not the piece I was looking for.

Gordon Marino, a professor at St. Olaf College and a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education writes of vague ideas surrounding Paterno’s legacy. He explains that some consider the coach a good man, while others speak nothing but condemnation.

Marino himself, however, offers little in the way of personal conviction, meagerly writing at the end of his article

But maybe sympathy is not something we have to measure out and save. Perhaps there is enough of it in us to cover both the victims, and Paterno, an otherwise good man who should have done more.

Perhaps, perhaps not. At any rate, this article barely qualifies as an opinion piece, and is much more in the way of a brief account of Paterno’s fall from grace bolstered by a few whitebread opinions. Largely unoriginal and largely uninteresting. I guess I’ll have to keep looking for some real conviction.

–Adam I. W. Schwartzman