You won’t see “Paternoville” outside Beaver Stadium this football season.
The student group that manages camp outs before home football games dropped the name of former Joe Paterno from the term they give the encampments that spring up as students get in line to get the best spots at Nittany Lion games.
“This is a decision undertaken and made solely by the Penn State student officers,” group president and PSU senior Troy Weller told Penn State Live. “Our four major officers, plus our six organizational officers, met via conference call, and after careful deliberation decided by a vote that, moving forward, the group will be named Nittanyville.”
The name change to the temporary tent city comes in the wake of the Freeh Report and its allegations that Paterno joined other Penn State leaders in concealing alleged child-sex abuse by former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Paterno, though never charged in the case, was found in the investigation by former FBI director Louis Freeh to have known of allegations of abuse by Sandusky for at least 14 years but having never reported it to police.
The group took little time to make the name change official. The former Paternoville web page was already updated to represent the name change Monday night.
The Nittany Lions take the field for the first opening day without Paterno in decades on Sept. 1 when they host Ohio.
