Let's take PSU and blow it up

"Of course we're going to riot. What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o'clock that they fired our football coach?"

- Paul Howard, 24, a Penn State aerospace-engineering student, as quoted in the New York Times

OK, SO maybe Paul Howard is no rocket scientist. (Oh, wait, actually he is a rocket scientist!) But I think that his comment sums up the real problem with the Penn-State-child-sex-cover-up-and-God-knows-what-else scandal.

People barely blink an eye when a 24-year-old adult in an elite academic program says that a) he attends a college where rioting isn't an anomaly but an expectation, and b) the cause for said rioting is the firing of a football coach.

Sure, Joe Paterno isn't just any football coach. His craggy, bespectacled face became the very symbol of the university - and arguably the state of Pennsylvania.

We've seen people taking it to the streets a lot this year, from Cairo to Zuccotti Park, and usually it takes something existential to get folks off their rear ends. In State College, that existential experience is the football program. Too many PSU students couldn't imagine life without their beloved JoePa on the sidelines, and when reality slapped them upside the head, they ran amok.

That's why the Penn State solution needs to be bolder than just a new president and a new face on the sidelines at Beaver Stadium.

In a place where preserving the cash cow of a winning football program became more important than the safety of children, there's only one solution:

Blow up - metaphorically speaking - the main campus in State College.

Split up the student population among the 19 so-called commonwealth or branch campuses that now educate nearly 40 percent of the student body. Then launch a major expansion with new construction and real job creation at those sites, to fulfill Gov. Corbett's so-far-empty promise of "jobs, jobs, jobs."

Make the State College campus much smaller - with a student body closer to 10,000 and a focus on central Pennsylvania. Let the new, pumped-up regional campuses have varsity football programs - just not in Division I.

Why? Because the culture of corruption at Penn State clearly runs deeper than just one monster who got away with sexually abusing young boys. What a lot of people are unwilling, still, to admit is that the Jerry Sandusky scandal has exposed Joe Paterno - along with his enablers - as an Emperor with No Clothes, parading down College Avenue on his white horse.

Paterno's "grand experiment" started failing a long time ago. His student-athletes starting misbehaving in the 1990s. One time JoePa even seemed to make light of sexual-assault allegations against a star player, prompting the National Organization for Women to call for his resignation.

Now, the Sandusky probe has exposed an entire community, including administrators, campus police and local law-enforcement, in the tank to protect the sacred cow disguised as a Nittany Lion.

Meanwhile, the most unsettling thing about Wednesday night's riot was how predictable it was. In the last decade, we've seen students go on destructive rampages after Penn State lost a basketball game in 2001 and after it won a football game in 2008.

It's not the majority of the student body; others have righteously protested against child abuse.

But rioters are now the public face of Penn State. Maybe putting 45,000 students in one rural town, where the economy is built on a currency of Jell-O shots, isn't such a great idea after all.

So, let's end the real "grand experiment," that of a supersized central campus. It failed.

Expanding the regional campuses would create thousands of construction jobs and new permanent academic positions, and you could direct the greatest growth to regions with the highest unemployment. Use empty space on the State College campus to launch a national anti-child-abuse center. Raze the showers where Sandusky is alleged to have committed heinous acts - and plant a garden there.

Could this happen? Of course not. For one thing, it would hurt business in Centre County in the short run.

But any solution needs to be radical. During the destructive rioting that followed Paterno's dismissal, a familiar chant echoed across the campus:

"We are . . . Penn State!"

Never before has a problem been summed up so well in just four little words.