Surma announced that an agreement appeared to have been reached to fire Paterno, too — the trustees having determined that he had failed to take adequate action when he was told that one of his longtime assistants had been seen molesting a 10-year-old boy in Paterno’s football facility.
Surma, those present recalled, surveyed the other trustees — there are 32 total — for their opinions and emotions before asking one last question: ‘‘Does anyone have any objections? If you have an objection, we’re open to it.’’
No one in the room spoke. There was silence from the phone speakers. Paterno’s 46-year tenure as head coach of one of the country’s storied college football programs was over, and the gravity of the action began to sink in.
‘‘It was hard for us to want to get to the point where we were going to say that,’’ said Ira M. Lubert, a board member who works in private equity. ‘‘I was laying in bed that night shaking. And I couldn’t sleep, thinking: We just terminated Joe Paterno.’’
The 100 or so hours beginning with the arrest of Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator for the football team, had built to a climax by that Wednesday night’s meeting of the trustees. By then, the campus was aflame with discontent. Penn State students and faculty, its alumni and its growing number of outside critics had been roiled by anger and confusion, embarrassment and sorrow. Reporters had inundated State College. It was, plainly put, the most trying time in Penn State’s 156-year history.
On Wednesday, in a conference room in New Jersey, a group of 13 trustees spoke to The New York Times in detail about that week — a somewhat frantic, certainly exhausting week that led to the firings of Paterno and Spanier and to the riots on campus that those dismissals set off. The board decided to share its story because it grew weary of hearing criticism, which included calls from alumni who started a group known as Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship in an effort to replace the current board members.
