Paterno-pay issue ends up in high court – Patriot-News
The Patriot-News has been trying for five years to find out how much money Joe Paterno makes. It is part of the an effort to find out how much some Penn State administrators earn. I am all for sunshine laws, but I think the actions of the Patriot-News could ultimately generate backlash that could harm such laws.
While Penn State is the Land Grant university of Pennsylvania, it is not technically a “state university.” Penn State would have to receive more of its funding from the commonwealth to be considered a “state university.” This puts it in a position of being somewhere between a public and private university (Pitt and Temple have this classification as well). Penn State lets situations determine when it considers itself public or private. It tends to work out pretty well for the university most of the time, but it causes resentment in the commonwealth.
When it comes to administrator salaries, Penn State considers itself private and withholds that data. The Patriot-News is pushing to get this information made public since those administrators are technically state employees and therefore, the salary information is supposed to be a public record. That is reasonable. Going after Paterno strikes me as unnecessary because while Paterno is a technically state employee and a member of the state’s retirement system (ha!) his salary is paid in full by the Nittany Lion Club which receives no funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians tax dollars are not at work here, so I don’t see why the Patriot-News is pushing so hard on him.
I don’t really care how much Paterno makes because the university could never adequately compensate him for all that he has done on the field and off of it. It is not unreasonable to assume that Paterno has directly and indirectly raised over $1,000,000,000 during his career. Given the backlash I have already seen on some Nittany Lions blogs, I could see opportunistic politicians use this as an opportunity to roll back existing Sunshine Laws.
By the way, I predict that if Paterno’s salary is revealed that it will be among the lower half of his Big11Ten peers.
