Vicky Triponey, the woman who took on JoePa

Looking back, Vicky Triponey said she can't help but wonder if there was some "correlation" between the success of the Penn State football team and how her role in charge of student conduct at the university was perceived.

Hired by former Penn State president Graham B. Spanier in 2003 as the university's vice president for student affairs, Triponey remembers Spanier initially "was probably my greatest champion. . . . I was his choice."

Then things changed.

"In 2003 and 2004, our football team was struggling," Triponey said. "That's when I felt incredible support from board members and the president, to stick to your guns, stay firm, do the right thing. Don't you dare treat those football players any differently. That was vocalized to me many times."

Soon, Triponey said, her "debate" with coach Joe Paterno "started to heat up, and we started to win more games. I don't know. There appears to be a correlation. The support for judicial affairs and for my efforts trying to maintain that fair process seemed to decline as that [winning] improved."

By 2007, Triponey said, she was told she was "too pushy and confrontational, too aggressive," and wasn't going to get a raise that year - "We would wait six months and see if I would adjust my behavior" - after getting nothing but praise in previous evaluations. She left the school in 2007, technically on sabbatical until 2008. Now interim vice president for student affairs at the College of New Jersey, Triponey sat for a one-hour interview Thursday afternoon in a conference room attached to her office.

Triponey said she doesn't believe the "Grand Experiment," the idea that football players could be students, that Penn State under Paterno was trying to reach the highest ground, was a fraudulent concept. A native of Clearfield County, just west of State College, she grew up the daughter of a huge Penn State fan.

"That lens led me to believe that Coach really was a pretty remarkable man," Triponey said. "To this day, I think I may believe that. But I don't know, somewhere along the way, the pedestal got so high for the program. The Grand Experiment became such a perfect image - and a facade - that we didn't dare let on there were blemishes."

Triponey herself chose the University of Pittsburgh for her undergraduate studies, "because I was a rebel," she said.

Triponey said that when she got to Penn State she "wasn't naive about big-time athletics," having previously worked at Connecticut and Georgia. But she described how there were battles at Penn State with Paterno as he tried to maintain total control of determining discipline for his players. There was a constant concern by top administrators over how Paterno would respond to her efforts to remain independent and also a suggestion that Penn State policies on discipline for off-campus incidents mirror those of top rival Ohio State.

Paterno's anger at her, she said, caused the late coach to derisively refer to her as "that lady in Old Main" in a radio interview.

Freeh Report investigators interviewed her, Triponey said, although Triponey said she didn't have any knowledge of issues related to Jerry Sandusky. The questions were about the general culture of Penn State, which she described as "insular and secretive," a culture she said extended far beyond the athletic department. She's also talked to questioners from several other investigations, although not the NCAA, she said.

"I do believe Penn State ought be held accountable for some of what's happened here, but I don't know what that means in terms of a sanction," Triponey said. "I do believe the NCAA has to take some leadership here, and that's not just about Penn State. This is a wake-up call that we all need to pay attention to."

Most important, she said of Penn State, "You've got to change the culture, and the culture is deep. It's not just the leaders. It permeates the place. I think they have an interconnectiveness in their passion for their football program. But I'm not sure that's a genuine sense of community. It's a sense of pride. It's a sense of prestige."

Triponey rolled her eyes at the mention of complaints by some Penn State students and alumni that she tried to silence student representation in student affairs during her time there, saying that could not be further from the truth.

The "crux" of Paterno's issue with her department, Triponey said, was "we had a sanction called a deferred expulsion, which means if you've done something extremely bad, according to the guidelines of the code, you probably ought to be kicked out of here for a while."

There were "benefits of the doubt" built into this, Triponey said. "If you gave some hint during the process that you had learned and were remorseful, many times they would use that sanction to allow you to continue to go to classes, to maintain your academic eligibility, and maintain your studies. But you couldn't do anything else. You couldn't do anything extracurricular.

"That's what the coach was really pretty angry with us about, that we should not be able to say they could not go to practice or play in a game. I think we would even sometimes stretch it and say they could go work out so they could stay fit."

Triponey said in one case she told a player he couldn't practice while he was being told by a coach he had to practice. Triponey said she told higher-ups she had to go to practice to see that the player wasn't putting his own future in jeopardy. She was told she couldn't go to practice.

Did she ever attend a football practice?

"Where? At Penn State? No. I never set foot in the football facility at Penn State," Triponey said.

Triponey had been vice chancellor for student affairs at Connecticut from 1998 to 2003, and said she had a strong relationship with Huskies football coach Randy Edsall, now the coach at Maryland.

"I would go on the plane to go to an away game," Triponey said. "I would eat dinner with the team. I had coaches to my home for a social with the student-affairs staff. I could go anyplace I wanted to go to be a part of the football program."

That was true with basketball at UConn, too?

"Um, no, I was not as close to the basketball program," Triponey said. "In fact, there probably were some similarities here. There was more of a secretive approach to men's basketball. Women's, absolutely. . . . I knew the players by name. They knew me."

At one point during her time at Penn State, she e-mailed a plea that outside interference "simply MUST STOP. . . . It appears on our end a deliberate effort to use the power of the football program to sway our decisions in a way that is beneficial to the football program."

Another issue, she said, was that she refused to meet with Paterno while a case was being adjudicated since she was the final appeal officer after judicial affairs made a determination. This especially upset him, she said.

It all came to a head, she said, after a major incident in April 2007. More than two dozen Penn State football players forced their way into an off-campus party. What resulted were criminal charges against six players and convictions for two. None of the players ever missed a game.

"It was the most manipulated discipline case I've ever experienced in my 30 years of higher education," Triponey said.

Manipulated by whom?

"Senior leadership of the place," Triponey said. "The committee you see being talked about in the Freeh Report, including the coach. It would have been the president, the athletic director, the attorney, and the football coach."

"There were many, many, many struggles," she added. "We had meetings at the president's home late at night with the folks from judicial affairs so we could go over what they were finding in the case, so we could figure out what sanctions would be acceptable on the athletic side. Completely inappropriate."

When she went public with some of these claims to the Wall Street Journal last November, a Paterno attorney said her allegations were "out of context, misleading and filled with inaccuracies."

The greater public reaction at the time, Triponey said, "was not just an awkwardness. I mean, I felt unsafe. To the point, I went back for a funeral a few months ago for a dear friend, one of the few friends I still had at the place. . . . I would not stay at a hotel in State College. I stayed in Lock Haven."

With the release of the Freeh Report and her appearance last weekend on CNN, the response was much different, she said. She felt the Freeh Report represents the start of an important discussion.

"I have had several hundred e-mails after the CNN piece. Only one of those is hate mail. Every other one is extremely supportive," Triponey said, adding that many are from Penn State graduates. She tells them they need to get involved.

"I don't want to give up on the place because I think there are so many really good people inside of Penn State," Triponey said. "I think it's really dependent on first if they have the courage to hire the right president."

Triponey said change must go beyond following rules and regulations on issues such as the reporting of child sexual abuse. Even in student affairs, she said, "We were not really well connected in the profession of student affairs. We thought we did it better than anybody, so why would we spend our time going to a lot of professional conferences and learning how others are doing it if we do it better than anybody?"