UTEP Students React to Penn State Paterno Riots

Loyalty and tradition are powerful forces.

Add passion for your alma mater and the sport, and you have an explosion that can turn violent, just like the Penn State riots over longtime coach Joe Paterno’s firing on Wednesday night, at any minute.

“I understand that he’s been there for so long and they idolized him,” UTEP student Anthony Robles said Thursday. “But I think going out like that’s a little too crazy.”

Other UTEP students, however, said they would have taken part in the demonstration. “I would definitely be in the riot,” an unidentified student told ABC-7.

“He is Penn State,” UTEP football player A.C. Patterson said. “You can’t picture Penn State without him.

Paterno and former school president Graham Spanier were accused of not doing enough back in 2002 after a graduate assistant told Paterno he saw then-defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky abusing a boy in the team showers. Paterno told two members of the administration, who failed to notify police.

“This is just not another winning coach,” UTEP History Professor Dr. Charles Martin said. “This is the coach that they’ve ever had, practically.”

Penn State may have had its Joe Paterno, but El Paso had late Hall of Fame basketball coach Don Haskins, who was idolized before his death in 2008 much the way that Paterno has been.

“I suppose in a way Coach Haskins was the counterpart here,” said Dr. Martin, who feels that sometimes coaches are put on too high of a pedestal. “It’s part of a larger trend in society whether athletes, entertainers, prominent politicians, we don’t separate the actual person from the image.”

Dr. Martin said UTEP students aren’t known for their activism. Other than a campus celebration that got a bit out of hand after the school clinched the 1966 NCAA Basketball title and a 1971 sit-in demonstration when Chicano students protested the conditions for Mexican-American students on campus, he knew of no other protests on campus.

ABC-7 also spoke with El Pasoan Zaira Crisafulli, a former Penn State graduate student, about the riots. She said she was embarrassed about what happened at her former school.

Crisafulli added: “Football at Penn State has once again gained the spotlight and moved it away from the victims in this case.”