Blue White Illustrated

JUDGMENT CALL Stranger than fiction I s it too late to hire the Coen brothers to make ���Happy Valley,��� the Joe Paterno biopic that���s supposedly coming our way in a couple of years? The Coens make a lot of movies, alternating between screwball comedies (���Raising Arizona,��� ���The Big Lebowski���) and brooding tragedies (���Fargo,��� ���No Country for Old Men���). ���Happy Valley��� would be the perfect vehicle with which to demonstrate their genre-spanning cinematic range. While no one at Penn State has been threatened by marmotwielding thugs, nor has any evidence been stuffed into a woodchipper (not yet, anyway), the fight over Penn State���s football program ��� past, present and future ��� has taken on a farcical quality that is decidedly Coen-esque. It���s a screwball tragedy. In the past few weeks we���ve seen a university trustee, exhibiting all the PR savvy we���ve come to expect from the board, try to tamp down growing discontent over Paterno���s dismissal by invoking the O.J. Simpson case. Because, really, what could be less contentious than a notorious murder trial? We���ve seen the ���Today��� show air segments of a jailhouse interview with Jerry Sandusky on a recent Monday morning, in between cat videos culled from YouTube and scenes of Al Roker clowning around in Times Square with a guy dressed as a pink dinosaur. We���ve seen a member of the Paterno family challenged on Twitter for being insufficiently supportive of Joe Paterno. We���ve seen a radio talk show host emerge as a hero to some Penn State football fans and the university president emerge as a villain. We���ve seen all sorts of crazy things we never expected or wanted to see, and given that there���s a trustees election under way that may further inflame tensions both between the board and alumni and within the board itself, we���re probably going to see more of the same in the coming weeks. Suffice it to say, the people who actually are set to make ���Happy Valley��� ��� director Brian DePalma of ���Scarface��� fame and writer Dave McKenna, who penned ���American History X��� ��� already have a lot of material with which to build a compelling narrative. What they don���t have is an ending. At least not yet. There���s been a lot of tension lately along the two fault lines that have opened up within the university community. Paterno���s dismissal remains the third rail of Penn State politics, albeit a third rail that people have been grabbing with both hands lately, from trustees like Ken Frazier and Paul Suhey to media provocateurs like John Ziegler. And of course there are the NCAA sanctions, which are receiving renewed scrutiny thanks to a leaked email from a former investigator claiming that Penn State president Rodney Erickson acquiesced to penalties the NCAA didn���t actually have the authority to levy. Those fault lines intersect in two places. The first is on the board of trustees, where Suhey and Stephanie Deviney are running for re-election against a group of 37 hopefuls, many inspired by the firing of Paterno and the board���s handling of the Freeh re- port. The last time Suhey and Deviney ran for seats on the board, they took office without anyone complaining or even really noticing. That���s how it went in the days before the Sandusky scandal. You got your alumni ballot, you clicked on the names that looked most familiar or, more likely, you ignored your ballot altogether. Over the years, Penn State���s board has, like Penn State itself, proven highly resistant to change. But it is not completely impervious, and now that a faction of Penn State���s massive alumni base has been radicalized by Paterno���s firing, the board is slowly being refashioned into a more responsive body. But responsive to what? That���s the big question that hangs over Penn State as it looks to move forward in the aftermath of the scandal. If Suhey and Deviney are voted out (the third open seat is the one from which Steve Garban resigned last July), they will most likely be replaced by candidates who were inspired to take action by Paterno���s firing. That will bring to six the number of candidates who have been voted onto the board by a football-focused electorate, and there���s every reason to believe that three more will follow next year. The efforts on behalf of Paterno began as an attempt to clear the name of a beloved public figure but lately have come to seem more like an expression of rage at the university���s leadership. When a recent Daily Collegian editorial dared to suggest that there were other issues worthy of the board���s consideration, the newspaper was besieged by complaints from irate readers accusing the students of being puppets of the trustees. As it happens, Penn State is seeking a new president ��� a rather important issue ��� and the pool of potential candidates can���t help but be impacted by the realization that whoever accepts that position will be stepping into a civil war. The choice of a president will affect faculty retention, fundraising, enrollment and many other facets of university life that are even

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