bunch of weirdo cult members. that's how I think of the whole school and its students/staff. as a cult, with happy valley as their compound and the corpse of joe paterno as their departed leader
and I realize that's not fair, that many Penn State people are perfectly sane and rightfully disgusted with the whole thing. but there's more than enough bad apples to spoil the bunch
So I'm out in San Diego now as some of you may (or likely don't care to) know. My girl has made a good friend at work and so I've met her, hung out at a brewery a few times with her and her guy. Super friendly, doesn't seem stupid, at his core a decent guy; but last time we hung out as a group Penn State somehow came up (might have been related to the trivia night we were at) and, in public, this dude started to go in to the whole "Paterno did nothing wrong, he did everything he had to in accordance with the rules, blah blah..." and I was quiet for a minute and then started to gently ask "...do you
really think that what he did was at all defensible, that he sat by and kept that monster on his staff while he knew what was happening..." and then he actually goes "You're right, you're right, I'm sorry, I shouldn't blah blah..."
I think they all know at their god did some extremely deplorable things and really just put up a token defense/downplay like that that they will allow to crumble if someone actually pushes the issue, like many in the UConn world would if it turned out JC was a scumbag on Paterno's level. Turns out they do have some clue as to how awful it was to allow a known child rapist a la carte access to dozens of victims. But yeah, it's disturbing enough that they'll even do that in the first place. I was fairly dumbfound when we left.