Photo of the Paterno Statue, January 2012
Photo taken by Paterno Fellow Carolyn Lasky
Originally uploaded by LAUSatPSU
Dear Liberal Arts Student Colleagues:
Joe Paterno said that he wanted to be remembered as an educator who made Penn State a better place. However impressive his record as a football coach, his most lasting and meaningful legacy remains the contributions he has made to enrich the educational lives of our students. Nowhere has this legacy been more palpably felt or more deeply appreciated than in the College of the Liberal Arts.
Joe, Sue, and the entire Paterno family have established scholarships supporting students who could not otherwise afford a Penn State education; they have funded graduate student fellowships, the Richards Civil War Center, and the Paterno Family Professorship. The Paternos have found ways to support the academic mission of our College at every level.
It is fitting, therefore, that their greatest contribution has been their visionary support for the Paterno Liberal Arts Undergraduate Fellows Program. With one hundred students set to graduate in the spring of 2012, over two hundred others who have performed their way into the Schreyer Honors College by aspiring to be a Paterno Fellow, and almost four hundred students still aspiring, the Paterno Fellows program is well positioned to enrich the educational lives of our undergraduates for generations to come.
The program embodies these words Joe Paterno spoke to the graduates of the class of 1973:
“It is being involved in a common cause which brings us joy and memories which endure. It is making our very best effort, that we have stretched to the very limit of our ability, which makes us bigger and able to stretch again: to reach even higher as we undertake new challenges.”
Our common cause is education, and Joe Paterno has made us bigger and stretched us to higher achievement. Now, he has left us and we miss him. But his legacy, our common cause, endures.