Penn State AD and Sandusky Charged

lars10

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As my post said, it's based on the fact that Jay Paterno was elected to the Board of Trustees.

Until you or someone else can point to some recent scientific poll, we're all generalizing - or perhaps better said guessing - one way or another. My opinion is that the people who have come to an honest realization concerning Paterno are the minority of PSU fans. Your opinion seems to be different. We'll have to agree to disagree.

But hopefully we can agree that the discussion about Paterno's role shouldn't end.
Are you saying PSU fans? Or alumni..because if we're just speaking of fans of the football team you may be right. I plan to go back to State College this fall to visit a friend their and hopefully see some family.. I haven't really been back in a few years so I suppose I could test that idea of how the town has changed and if it is a majority that haven't changed.
 

soxfan121

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And it is the unwillingness of a significant number of Penn State fans (be they alums, residents, or just casual fans) to accept that Saint Joe was closer to Art Briles or Dave Bliss than he was to the image he built up over the years that drives the scorn and generalizations.
Yeah, but...

It's the 'yeah, but' that continues to stick in my craw. Joe Paterno keeps getting a "yeah, but" and no one is less deserving (IMO). There's no there there on the topic of Joe Paterno's reputation: his actions, not just w/r/t to Sandusky, but for decades, built the "college coach" myth that true reprobates like Briles and Bliss used as cover for their sickening track records.
 

SoxJox

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Rock > SoxJox < Hard Place
To be even more precise, "more than 700,000 degrees have been awarded in Penn State’s history. From the first 12 in 1861 to the more than 18,000 a year today...with the current number of living alumni pegged at more than 673,000. These Penn Staters can be found in all 50 U.S. states and more than 160 countries in the world."

Presently, the Penn State Alumni Association has 174,074 members (An annual snapshot of number of members and total Penn State alumni is taken each year on July 1.)
 

Average Reds

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Wasn't intending to lecture..although maybe I was. I was using the number maufman listed... but there are definitely a lot of alumni.. State College alone graduates 30,000 or so every year?
Given that there are approx 40,000 undergrads enrolled at the State College campus, my guess is that it's closer to 10,00 graduates each year. Maybe 13,000 if graduate students are included.

Edit: Just saw SoxJox post and dug some more. Apparently the number I quoted (which was a google search result) was pulled from LinkedIn, which by definition is an incomplete source. So I defer to him and have removed snark from my post and will now crawl away.
 
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lars10

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Given that there are approx 40,000 undergrads enrolled at the State College campus, I'd be interested to see how you get to 30,000 graduates each year.

I'll drop it now. Point is that if you ask for specificity from others, you should at least approximate it yourself.
Apologies again.. Understood your point. When I initially estimated I said hundreds of thousands of graduates. But the point stands. SoxJox was far more accurate.

edit: I was thinking of the population of the school.. and then used that for the graduating class..which was a dumb.
 

SoxJox

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Also, from 2016 (the latest year for which data is available through psu.edu), there were 47,261 students enrolled at the University Park [main] campus, with an additional 30,790 enrolled at the Commonwealth Campuses, and 13,411 in the World Wide Campus. Including the Dickinson School of Law, College of Medicine, and other affiliate educational institutions, total enrollment for 2016 was 99,133.
 
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SoxJox

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Jay Paterno was elected to the Board of Trustees after all.
And while we're on the subject of numbers, let's take a look at the official results from psu.edu.

There were 5 candidates for 3 alumni-elected positions in the latest State Board of Trustees election. 1 candidate dropped out before the election - leaving 4 finalists. Of 643,782 eligible voters, 21,333 (3.3%) ballots were cast (voters could select up to 3 candidates, or a total of 63,999 possible votes). A total of 54,835 votes were actually cast, so some did not vote for 3 candidates.

Jay received 16,322 (29.8%). Mind you, that's out of a potential total of 1,946,346 votes among all eligible voters. The other two winners, Alice Pope and Robert Jubelirer received 14,744 (26.9%) and 13,173 (24.0%). Dr. Pope is a tenured associate professor of child clinical psychology, and Jubelirer served in the Pennsylvania Senate from 1975 to 2006, was president pro tempore of the PA State Senate for 21 years, and served as PA lieutenant governor. The lowest vote getter was Robert Bowsher, a writer and accountant from California, who received 8,868 votes (16.2%). There were 1,728 write-in votes (3.2%)

I wouldn't read too much into that election result as indicative of some broad support among the larger alumni base. Jay will be one voice in 10 elected by alumni, and 1 of 34 total on the BoT.
 
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wade boggs chicken dinner

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I wouldn't read too much into that election result as indicative of some broad support among the larger alumni base. Jay will be one voice in 10 elected by alumni on the BoT.
I think many people who are not in the PSU community would draw the same inference as I did - that even though the aggregate number of votes for Jay Paterno was in the tens of thousands, the fact that he ran, was not (from what I understand) opposed by any rigorous opposition, and was the highest vote getter leads to the inference I mentioned above.

From what I see on the internet, the majority of non-PSU people who wrote about the election were stunned that it could happen.

But again, it's just my personal inference. And it also shows me that the conversation needs not to be stopped.