I don’t follow college football in any serious way, but I have a big soft spot for Penn State coach, Joe Paterno.

Joe and his wife, Sue, were the co-chairs of the expansion campaign for the PSU library in the 1990s, and, in addition to raising $14 million, they gave a quarter of a million dollars of their own money to the library building effort. Those figures from the Joe Paterno bio page at PSU, along with this:

“I’ve said it a hundred times,” Paterno stated at the time the drive began, “a great library is the heart of a great university, and if we want to remain a big league university, we’ve got to have a big league library.”

Hence, the Paterno Library.

As if that weren’t enough, Paterno and family gave more money to the University to endow faculty positions, including the “Paterno Family Professor in Literature,” a position currently held by one of my favorite academic author/bloggers, Michael Bérubé.

So that’s why I spent the last five hours of my life watching Penn State finally beat Florida State, 26 – 23 in triple overtime in the Orange Bowl. Whew!

Tags: , , ,