Joe Paterno — author of the “Grand Experiment” that sought to uphold academic standards in a major football program, the English major from Brown, the coach whose favorite poet is Virgil and who said, after his first national championship, that Penn State had to improve its library because “you can’t have a great university without a great library.” He and his wife, Sue, led the capital campaign that quadrupled the library’s size; the new wing bears their name.

Mr. Paterno and three university presidents — Bryce Jordan, Joab L. Thomas and Graham B. Spanier — were determined to compete with their counterparts in the Big Ten off the field as well as on. The Paterno family endowed two professorships that testify to their commitment to the humanities; one is in the library. The other is in English. I’m well acquainted with that professorship, since I happen to hold it.

I have had but one substantial encounter with Mr. Paterno, a postgame dinner 10 years ago (the Paternos host 50 or 60 guests on such occasions) during which I talked to him about Virgil and “Moby-Dick” — which he said he had recently reread. He noted that Ahab is furious that the whale can descend to the depths while Ahab himself remains on the surface of things. Since then, I’ve spoken chiefly to Sue, who works with Special Olympics and is friendly to my 20-year-old son, Jamie, who has Down syndrome. I’ve let her know that I’ve used the Paterno Fund for arts and humanities programming and disability studies. In this debacle, there seems no reason to think of her with anything but compassion.

And yet there is a sense in which the Paternos’ academic legacy makes the scandal worse, or more complicated, insofar as their reputation for academic integrity was well earned. Because of that reputation, Penn State faculty members were permitted to feel less conflicted about the school’s football program than our counterparts elsewhere; we took pride in the fact that the school had never run afoul of the N.C.A.A. and that its football coach benched star players for missing class. Now we are in shock.

The university’s acting president, Rodney A. Erickson, has promised a new era of transparency; he has also promised to appoint an ethics officer who will report directly to him. But it is entirely conceivable that when confronted by an issue with powerful repercussions for university business (whether with regard to athletics or to drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale), an ethics officer will offer advice that tries to protect the university — and its leadership — from damaging public scrutiny. And again no one will know until it is too late.