I’m in State College for the next few days. I’m visiting Punxsutawney today with Zach Zimbler, seeing the hog pulled from its box for the first time in person.

In getting in last night, I grabbed coffee downtown and read for a few hours at the Allen Street Grill. I was struck, as I always am, by how vividly the town’s traditions and heroes are on display. Joe Paterno is gone, but his image lingers everywhere. From corporate Dunkin Donuts to local street shops, he’s with us.

I’ve written a lot about the response of the Penn State Trustees to the Jerry Sandusky scandal. I’ve written a lot about Joe Paterno. For those of you reading without a Nittany Valley connection, I apologize for what must seem like an obsession. I write out of love, and concern for the future of a place that I consider a home and a people who have become my family.

Ben Novak has made the case (as have many) that the continued truculence of the trustees — from their New York Times apologia to their (probably necessarily) cold and corporate condolence to the Paterno family in the wake of JoePa’s death — is doing real, active, substantive harm to the University family.

What I think about the trustees boils down to this: if Graham Spanier as president needed to be fired, and Joe Paterno as football coach needed to be fired (the administrative and titular heads of the institution), then basic honor would compel the trustees (or any of the trustees) to resign in at least a gesture of sorrow.

“JoePa… a special place in Heaven,” declares a sign in the window of one downtown shop on College Avenue directly across from campus, and “PSU Trustees… an eternal place in hell.” This is the most visible and candid expression of the feelings that the real or perceived arrogance of the Board of Trustees has engendered among tens of thousands of the University family.

There’s real hurt here both from the dread of the looming circus of the public depravity of Jerry Sandusky and from the knowledge that the best man in the affair was disabused while those most legally responsible for ensuring they are an informed body of stewards has — alone among all persons or bodies — refused to accept or signal any sense of shared culpability.

That a great man should have been publicly disavowed and embarrassed to his death, while average men in the form of the trustees saw fit both to place blame and evade its scope is what sickens us, and defines the opposite of what trustee leadership should resemble.