Penn State is opening a new Joe Paterno exhibit on Sept. 3 at Beaver Stadium, and the school is walking straight into the same uncomfortable conversation it has been trying to manage for years: how do you honor a coach who shaped the program for 46 seasons and won 409 games without sanding off the hardest parts of his story?
That tension is built into the project itself. The new Paterno Family Football Experience Room is being presented as an interactive tribute to the history and tradition of Penn State football, and it is being financed by private donors. But from everything the university has said so far - the press release, Athletic Director Pat Kraft’s remarks, and the descriptions of the exhibit - there is no sign that it will deal with the more complicated side of Paterno’s legacy.
That absence is the real issue.
No one needs to relitigate the Jerry Sandusky scandal or Paterno’s firing in 2011. Those lines have already been drawn.
The sharper question is whether the exhibit even nods to that history at all. If it doesn’t, that would not be the same thing as moving forward.
It would be a choice to leave a central part of the story out.
In a museum setting, silence is not a neutral decision. It matters even more here because Penn State has already shown, in 2012, that it understood the need for a harder kind of honesty when it removed the Joe Paterno statue outside Beaver Stadium, calling it “a source of division and an obstacle to healing in our University and beyond.”
That’s why even a small acknowledgment would mean something. A single line on a “curated timeline” - something as plain as noting that the university's handling of the 2011 situation remains a subject of dispute and reflection - would not change the exhibit’s purpose. It would simply make the exhibit more complete.
And completeness is the point. Paterno was undeniably central to Penn State’s identity.
He mattered to generations of people connected to the university and the town around it. A museum can’t honestly tell Penn State’s story without him.
But if it tells his story without the darkest chapter, it isn’t really telling the whole thing.
So the question hanging over the new room is simple enough: does it make room for 2011, even in passing, or does it build a polished tribute that sidesteps the issue entirely? Very soon, Penn State will answer that question for itself.
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