This is a tragic skewing of priorities

Any reasonable adult would have followed it up, whether it caused trouble for the administration or not. The president has since been fired anyway, and there is no way that a man in Paterno's position would have had to fear for his job, especially since an investigation would have shown that he had been doing the morally correct thing in living up to the reputation he had carefully built over the years of "doing things the right way".

In the end, he was found to have feet of clay. Why didn't he report it to the police after telling the president? The same question could also be asked of the assistant who reported it to Paterno, and the janitors who knew and chose to remain silent.

If someone is murdered in the showers, do you call the Athletic Director or the police? Maybe both, but you call the cops first.

If players are raping a woman on campus, do you call the AD? Not first. This has been going on at least since 1988; 23 years, and the only thing that the people involved did was to tell him to take it somewhere else.
He did not even do that much. As recently as two weeks ago, he was in his office at the PSU athletic facilities.

See the link attached to my reply below for another perspective.