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Taliaferro, Lubrano, and McCombie Win Trustees Election
Anthony Lubrano speaks with alumni at the Meet the Candidates event held before the Blue White game. Photo by our editor, Tina Hay.
Exactly six months after the grand jury presentment was leaked—it was late afternoon, Nov. 4, when the charges made against Jerry Sandusky ’66, ’71g became known—the most contested Board of Trustees election in Penn State’s history ended. Adam Taliaferro ’05, Anthony Lubrano ’82, and Ryan McCombie ’70 will begin their three-year terms in July.
Everything about the election was unprecedented—the 86 candidates, the 37,579 votes cast, the hiring of KMPG to audit the results, which were announced in Friday’s Board of Trustees meeting. The university assigned PINs, allowing alumni to vote electronically, to 197,517 people, meaning that 19 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots.
Taliaferro, a lawyer and New Jersey selectman who’s best known as the football player who was paralyzed in a game against Ohio State, but beat the odds and learned to walk again, received 15,629 votes. Lubrano, a businessman who donated money for the baseball stadium, Medlar Field at Lubrano Park, received 10,096. McCombie, a businessman and retired Navy SEAL, received 4,806 votes.
Karen Peetz ’77, chair of the board, said she doesn’t anticipate any problems integrating the new alumni trustees, although emotions have run high since the Sandusky scandal, especially over Joe Paterno. She said Penn State is “extremely fortunate” that so many alums cared enough about the university to run.
The agricultural societies that elect six trustees also voted this week, with incumbent Carl Shaffer, president of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, and Donald Cotner ’71, president of an egg company, winning with 112 and 100 votes, respectively. Current business and industry trustees Kenneth Frazier ’75 and Edward Hintz ’59, whose terms expired in 2012, were re-elected to the board; business trustees are voted on by the board members. Gov. Tom Corbett has not yet decided on his appointees; the terms of two of his six appointees expire this year, as well.
Ryan McCombie meets alumni at an Alumni Association event in April. This photo, too, by Tina Hay.
During the meeting, Peetz noted that the board is considering changes in its structure, citing the reorganization of its standing committees in March. James Broadhurst ’65, who is chairing the governance and long-range planning committee, said the board is looking into term limits and how to better use the experience of the emeriti trustees, among other suggestions.
At this point, one of the spectators in the room asked if the board were taking questions from the public. Told that was not the case, he then said he just wanted to make a statement—that the trustees consider making it possible for students and faculty to interact directly with them.
But no aspect of the trustees has received more attention recently than the alumni vote; the Associated Press reported that it drew more attention that the Pennsylvania primary election. Eighteen other candidates received more than 1,000 votes:
Barbara L. Doran ’75: 4,040
Mark S. Connolly ’84g: 2,967
Ben Novak ’65, ’99g: 2,957
Vincent J. Tedesco Jr. ’74: 2,385
Anne Riley ’64, ’75g: 1,883
O. Richard Bundy ’93, ’96g: 1,864
John W. Diercks ’63, ’67g, ’75g: 1,761
Jayne E. Miller ’76: 1,653
Jonathan L. Wesner ’65: 1,530
George T. Henning Jr. ’63: 1,503
Joanne C. DiRinaldo ’78: 1,455
Thomas J. Sharbaugh ’73: 1,410
Darlene R. Baker ’80: 1,212
Patty Marrero ’88: 1,172
Matthew J. Lisk ’95: 1,060
Amy L. Williams ’80: 1,048
Marta Pepe Forney ’00: 1,047
William F. Oldsey ’76: 1,007
Three more alumni seats will come open next year. I’m sure I’m not alone in suspecting next year’s election will be hotly contested, too.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Alumni Meet the Board of Trustees Candidates
Editor Tina Hay took this photo of the Meet the Candidates event. A steady stream of alumni attended during the two-hour session before the Blue White game.
There was a guy with a clipboard taking notes. A few people who drove to campus for Blue White Weekend not to attend the football game, but to ask questions of some of the 86 candidates for the three open alumni seats on the Board of Trustees. And 60 of the candidates themselves, talking Saturday morning about issues facing Penn State, everything from the state appropriation to the treatment of Joe Paterno to the fact that a particularly important job that the next Board of Trustees will soon undertake is hiring the university’s next president.
I spent the morning at the Alumni Association’s Meet the Candidates event at the IM Building, and I came away impressed by the dedication of the candidates. (I tried to talk to each of them; I may have missed a few.) There were a lot of ideas in the room, and I’m hoping that although there will be 83 candidates who won’t join the board, that there’s a way to harness that energy and willingness to serve.
Many of the candidates said that reconnecting with other alumni—either to discuss issues or remember old times on campus or to simply explain how to request a ballot—has been a particularly valuable and enjoyable part of the process, which of course started because of dissatisfaction and dismay over how Penn State and the trustees handled the Sandusky scandal and aftermath.
The event attracted about 250 people–including Board of Trustees chair Karen Peetz and vice chair Keith Masser, who stayed for the entire time. About 37,000 more have read the candidates’ responses to our Three Questions project, which will remain available through the election. Voting is continuing through May 3, so there’s still plenty of time to make your decision.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Peetz, Erickson Answer Questions from Alumni Council
Six months after the Sandusky scandal broke, there are still questions. Lots of them. And, as Penn State president Rodney Erickson told Alumni Council, “There may be some questions we’ll never have answers for.”
That said, Erickson and Karen Peetz, chair of the Board of Trustees, answered as many as they could Friday afternoon from members of Alumni Council. They touched on everything from the relationship between the trustees and the president (something they agreed is not well enough understood) to what Peetz called “the super-positive of the enduring spirit of Penn Staters.” And they fielded several questions about Joe Paterno, including one that’s been asked at just about every opportunity: When and how will Penn State honor its late football coach?
Peetz said, as she has previously, that Penn State must wait until the Freeh report, more formally known as the findings of the trustees’ special investigations task force, before moving forward on plans to honor Paterno. She called the upcoming report “the ultimate in transparency.”
Former FBI director Louis Freeh was hired by the trustees just weeks after the scandal and charged with looking into all of the issues surrounding the scandal since. His findings—which Peetz said will not be edited by the board—are expected in August or September.
The task force does not have subpoena power. But Peetz said she spoke with Freeh’s investigators for three hours, that more than 200 people have been interviewed, and that Freeh is working with the state attorney general. “These people are not kidding around,” she said. “This is the FBI incarnate, and I don’t think anyone’s lying, I’ll tell you that.” (more…)
Ganim Wins Pulitzer for Sandusky Coverage
If you’ve been following the Sandusky scandal, I’m sure you’ve noticed the tenacious reporting of Sara Ganim ’08, whose March story first alerted the public that Jerry Sandusky ’66, ’71 MEd H&HD was being investigated by a grand jury, and who was at the forefront of the coverage when the scandal became national news in November. She was honored Monday afternoon with journalism’s highest prize, the Pulitzer.
The citation, for local reporting, reads like this: “Awarded to Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff, Harrisburg, Penn., for courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Penn State sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky.”
“This is definitely a win for the whole newsroom,” Ganim says in this video, which is upside-down. “For everybody standing here. And more important, I think it’s important for everyone in every newsroom just like ours for every newsroom across the country. because better than any award., the most rewarding thing in this whole process is people telling me this story and our coverage has changed their minds about local reporting.”
Ganim, who’s 24 years old and one of the youngest Pulitzer winners, is one of a very small group of Penn Staters who have been so honored:
Norman C. Miller ’56 of the Wall Street Journal won the 1964 prize for local, general, or spot news reporting for a “comprehensive account of a multi-million dollar vegetable oil swindle in New Jersey.”
Rod Nordland ’72 was part of a team from The Philadelphia Inquirer that won the 1983 prize for local, general, or spot news for coverage of the Three Mile Island accident.
Janet Day ’82 was part of a team at The Denver Post that won the 2000 prize for breaking news for coverage of the Columbine shootings.
Novelist Richard Russo, who taught at Penn State Altoona, won the 2002 prize in fiction for Empire Falls, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke taught at Penn State from 1936–1943. Additionally, archivist Paul Dzyak ’92 tells us, Donald Bartlett, half of a dynamic investigative duo with James Steele, briefly attended Penn State. Bartlett and Steele won the 1989 Pulitzer for national reporting for an investigation into the 1986 Tax Reform Act. And Mark E. Neely Jr., McCabe-Greer Professor of American Civil War History, won the 1992 prize for history for The Fate of Liberty.
Thanks to Dzyak and Vicki Fong ’81, manager of public relations for the College of the Liberal Arts, for helping to compile this list. If you know of anyone we missed, please let us know in the comments or at our Facebook page.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
P.S. Additionally, Diane Ackerman ’70 was a finalist for the Pulitzer in non-fiction for One Hundred Names for Love, which we excerpted in our July/August issue.
Three Questions for the Board of Trustees Candidates
How on earth do you differentiate among 86 candidates for the three open alumni seats on the Board of Trustees? I had been asking myself that question for a while—even before I knew the final number of people on the ballot. It seemed like every time I picked up a newspaper, someone else was declaring his or her candidacy. I lost count of how many.
By the time the final number—a record, by far—was determined, I thought I had a good handle on what the candidates thought about the trustees’ handling of the Sandusky scandal. The media coverage—understandably—focused on it. And when the official position statements (which you can find here), were released, most of them dealt primarily with the scandal and its aftermath, too.
That wasn’t enough for me. As a journalist, a Penn State alum, and a Penn State employee, I had more questions. Penn State has other large issues it must confront in the coming years—particularly the annual fight for state appropriation dollars and the steady rise of tuition. I think it’s important for the Board of Trustees candidates to address those issues, too. We brainstormed for a bit at the office, and we crafted three questions we thought could add to the discussion.
Sure, we’d love to hear all of the trustees—not just the ones currently running for the board—address these wider issues. But alumni can vote only for the nine alumni seats on the board, and only three are up every year. We decided to focus where we could shed the most light—the candidates in the most prominent trustees election in Penn State’s history.
So we emailed the three questions to the 86 candidates. We weren’t sure what to expect, but a week later, 72 of them had responded. That’s 83.7 percent. In the research world, they call that a “robust” response. We’re thrilled.
We are presenting the responses to you exactly as the candidates wrote them; click here to read them, either by candidate or by question. If responses exceeded the 250-word limit, we trimmed them, and if something was particularly unclear, we contacted the author to clarify. Otherwise, their responses are unvarnished and unedited.
The candidates raise many important points, and they float some interesting solutions. It’s a lot to digest, we know. But we hope you’ll take some time to learn about the candidates before you vote, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think, too, in the comments below or on our Facebook page.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
P.S. This is just one of two initiatives that Alumni Association is doing to help alumni make an informed choice. There’s a Meet the Candidates event from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 21, before the Blue-White game, and we hope you’ll be able to attend that, too. You can find out more about the event here.
Videogames in the Classroom? They Might Help Boys Learn
Every chair was taken, causing the staff at Schlow Memorial Library to quickly add a few more rows in the back of the room. But still, some people had to stand in the back of the room, and others peeked in through the doors.
They came to the spring’s first talk in the Research Unplugged series—which is designed to connect Penn State’s researchers with the State College community—to hear Alison Carr-Chellman, department head and professor instructional systems in the College of Education, discuss how the U.S. school system is failing boys. Looking out at the crowd, she said, “I do think the gender issue brings out lots of people.”
It certainly does. Carr-Chellman gave a talk about the issue at TEDxPSU in 2010, and since the video was posted on the main TED website, she’s received at least one email or phone call every day. She believes that a combination of Zero Tolerance policies (designed to stop bullying and violence) that are carried too far, a drop in the number of male elementary school teachers, and a collaborative learning culture that discourages competition and individualism are causing boys to tune out in the classroom—and eventually drop out.
She provided a lot of numbers to back up her position—check out The Boys Initiative or the 100 Girls Project, which has found, for instance, that for every 100 girls who are expelled from school, 325 boys are. And she talked about a provocative solution: incorporating videogames, even violent ones such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, into the classroom.
The way Carr-Chellman framed her talk was particularly clever. She asked, “What are boys like?” Then she showed a photo of her sons curled up together in a hammock, reading books—it was titled, “what we want them to be like.” She then showed a second photo—the same boys, outfitted for Halloween in full soldier regalia. “Halloween,” she said, laughing, “is all about, ‘Can I get a sword or an axe or a mace?’”
Just about everyone in the audience laughed knowingly.
Carr-Chellman understands that some teachers have reservations about using videogames, and she certainly doesn’t want to abolish Zero Tolerance programs. She’s also a feminist, and she doesn’t want to hinder girls’ progress at the expense of boys. But she wants policy makers and teachers to think about ways to keep boys engaged in the classroom. “This is a symptom of a larger problem,” she said. “They need to feel confident.”
The issue is complex, and it deserves a thorough treatment; we’re working on a story about Carr-Chellman and her research for an upcoming issue. In the meantime, you can check out her TEDxPSU talk here, and watch an excerpt from her Research Unplugged talk here.
And if you’re in the State College area on a Thursday between now and April 19, stop by Schlow Memorial Library, on the corner of Beaver Avenue and Allen Street, for additional speakers. The talks start at 12:15 p.m. and last for about an hour. They’re always worth the time.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Wrestlers Hungry to Defend NCAA Title
Frank Molinaro celebrates his Big Ten title.
This time, of all things, it was cake.
Asked Monday afternoon if he had anything special planned for the wrestling team headed into the NCAA Championships, which start Thursday morning in St. Louis, coach Cael Sanderson said that after practice, everyone would eat a treat baked by a friend, Bonnie Epstein, who lives in Ohio. Explained Sanderson, “To celebrate how great we’re going to wrestle this weekend.”
It was hard to know how seriously to take that. Wrestlers? Chowing down on cake? The week of the biggest tournament of the season? Except for heavyweights, these guys watch every mouthful they consume. Back in my Collegian days, I once interviewed a wrestler who told me the only thing he’d eaten since Monday was a Chicklet (this was on a Thursday), and earlier this season, 149-pounder Frank Molinaro cracked that when friends came over to watch Phil Davis compete in UFC, he served ice chips. I’m pretty sure that even though he laughed, that wasn’t really a joke.
But on Tuesday, Sanderson tweeted, “There’s ‘the Force’ in Star Wars and ‘the Power of Greyskull’ in He-man but nothing compares to the power of Bonnie Epstein.” So, apparently, he did let the wrestlers eat a little cake. And, apparently, it was really good. (Or, maybe, he ate it all himself?)
Asked about how, specifically, the Nittany Lions were preparing to defend their NCAA team title, Sanderson was a lot more reticent. Some guys watch film, some guys don’t. He wouldn’t specify who was who. He mentioned, again, that the wrestlers were at their best when they were confident and having fun, and he trotted out all of the usual clichés, about how winning the Big Ten title was a good “stepping stone” to the NCAAs, and how the wrestlers “feed off each other” when one particular guy dominates his opponent.
He also mentioned in passing that the Nittany Lions are underdogs in their quest to win back-to-back NCAA team titles. On paper, going by the seeds, if every wrestler holds his spot, the team title would go to Iowa. In real life, though, the Nittany Lions will be relying, again, on bonus team points for major decisions, technical falls, and pins. That’s the aggressive style of wrestling that made them the first Penn State NCAA team champion—and first team champion from east of the Mississippi—since 1953.
They’ve qualified nine wrestlers for nationals, and three of them are undefeated No. 1 seeds—Molinaro, 165-pounder David Taylor, and 174-pounder Ed Ruth. (Ruth, by the way, is still sporting a two-toned hairdo, but he’s swapped out the blond for teal.) All of them were dominant at the Big Ten tournament, enabling the Nittany Lions to come from behind after they fell to third on the first day of the two-day tournament. If you want to get a sense of how pumped up these guys are, take a look at this video of Molinaro celebrating his victory. That’s some serious chest-thumping.
Wrestling starts Thursday morning, with the quarterfinals Friday morning and the semifinals Friday night. You can catch some of the action online at ESPN3 or on ESPNU (click here for the broadcast schedule). The finals, televised live by ESPN are at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Should be fun to watch.
“Everybody expects that we’re going to be the champion,” Taylor said. “We expect the same thing.”
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Penn State Wrestling’s Recipe for Success: Smile
Ed Ruth, undefeated at 174 pounds, posed with his two-toned tournament hairdo for Blue White Illustrated's Tim Owen.
In a glass-walled conference room in the Lorenzo Wrestling Complex on Tuesday afternoon, coach Cael Sanderson calmly explained how the Big Ten Wrestling Tournament is seeded and assessed the Nittany Lions’ chance to win the tournament, which starts Saturday at Purdue.
Meanwhile, visible over his right shoulder, two wrestlers arrived for practice, grabbed a couple of foam swords (!?) and began whaling on each other. One wrestler ended up on the floor as the other “stabbed” him repeatedly in the torso, and while I can’t swear to this—Cael moved his head, blocking my view—it’s possible that the victor then staged a mock decapitation.
This is not particularly unusual behavior in the wrestling room. Last week, I encountered a cutthroat dodgeball game, with wrestlers heaving multi-colored playground balls at each other and coaches Cody Sanderson and Casey Cunningham in the middle of the fray. Cunningham was so fired up, he was yelling like a banshee.
So was David Taylor, the top-ranked 165-pounder, who assured me later that they were using the official rules of the “American Dodgeball Association of America,” and added, with a completely straight face, “The five Ds are really important.” (For those of you who, inexplicably, haven’t watched the comedy classic Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, that’s Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive … and Dodge.)
Taylor also assured me that playing games is an important part of the defending NCAA champions’ success. “The coaches do more than encourage that kind of thing,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “Look, Cody’s playing kickball out there right now.”
And for all that Cael Sanderson’s public demeanor is pretty serious, he’s got an occasionally hilarious Twitter feed and he is the guy who posted giant yellow smiley faces in the wrestling room leading up to last season’s NCAA tournament. (This week, signs simply say SMILE.) He wants his wrestlers to be prepared, but loose. (more…)
Sculptor Knew His Creation Could Become Iconic
Sara Platz Brennan '92 took this photo of Angelo DiMaria's statue shortly after Joe Paterno's death.
The request was unusual. Sculptors don’t often receive commissions for living people, says Angelo DiMaria, who’s made his living as a sculptor for decades. But about in 2001, he was asked to sculpt the likeness of Joe Paterno, who was approaching his 324th victory.
DiMaria, although he lives in Berks County, Pa., had never seen a football game. He’d never been to Penn State. But he quickly realized the project’s importance. “We knew that this was going to become a mecca,” he says. “A tremendous monument. Although Joe Paterno didn’t really want the statue up. He was very humble about it.”
And DiMaria’s statue, located on the east side of Beaver Stadium since November 2001, has become a place for Penn Staters—including Jay Paterno—to gather and remember and mourn. When I drove past just before 8 a.m. Friday, the candles and notes and flowers surrounding the statue were nearly spilling over into Porter Road.
The statue was a surprise for Paterno, meaning he couldn’t pose for DiMaria. And DiMaria sculpts from photographs, anyway. So he went to Beaver Stadium “disguised as a reporter, with a tag around my neck,” he recalls, and was astounded by it. “It was an experience just to be there,” he says. “It looked like a giant spaceship, like in outer space somewhere.”
DiMaria snapped more than 100 photographs, then went back to his studio and worked on an 18-inch model to show the Paterno family for approval. He spent most of his time working to make the face—the portrait, he calls it—exactly right. “It’s something almost mystical when I do a portrait shot of someone,” he says. “It’s not enough just to get the features perfectly. You have to have that extra. I don’t know where that comes from. … You have to capture the spirit of that person.”
His assistants helped to cast the full-size model, which is bronze, 7 feet tall, and weighs more than 900 pounds. (And the statue’s raised finger, DiMaria says, has been misinterpreted; it’s not about Joe Paterno himself: “The pointed finger in the air stands for State College. Penn State. We’re No. 1, not Joe Paterno No. 1. But obviously he is No. 1, of course.”)
In our May/June 2002 issue, we published a photograph of graduates posing with the statue and noted, that it “already is beginning to challenge the Nittany Lion Shrine’s current standing as the best place for a photo op.” The connection many students and alums feel to the statue—and Paterno—was evident in November, when rumors repeatedly surfaced that the statue would be removed in the wake of the Sandusky scandal and Paterno’s firing. Even repeated denials by president Rodney Erickson couldn’t stop the rumors.
Those rumors distressed DiMaria, too, and he’s pleased that it’s no longer a worry. “They can’t dare take it down now,” he says. “It would be traumatic. There are too many emotions involved.”
DiMaria never met his subject, which is kind of a shame—he grew up in Sicily, and no doubt would have had plenty to talk about with a fellow Italian. “It was just an honor to do the statue,” he says. “I’m happy with that.”
Lori Shontz, senior editor
A Heartfelt Goodbye
This public information photo shows some of the 12,000 attendees at Joe Paterno's memorial service at the Bryce Jordan Center.
Father Matthew Laffey of the Penn State Catholic Center set the tone—and provided a broad outline of Joe Paterno’s life—in his opening prayer. “Thank you for this man. … How fortunate this corner of your kingdom has been.”
The details came slowly over the next two hours Thursday afternoon, as speakers at A Memorial for Joe painted pictures of the man who helped to build—and became largely synonymous with—Penn State.
We met the competitive Joe. “The bigger the game, the quieter he was in practice,” said Todd Blackledge, quarterback of the 1982 national championship team. “But the gleam in his eyes told the story.”
The literary Joe, who never called Susan Welch, dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, anything other than “Dean,” who donated millions of dollars to the library, and who clearly passed that love of literature on to his son. Here’s who Jay Paterno quoted in his closing eulogy: Sophocles, William Blatty, U2, John Adams, John Ruskin, Tennessee Williams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Arthur Ashe.
The funny Joe, so quick with a one-liner, who told Jimmy Cefalo’s mother on a recruiting visit, “Your pasta is better than Mrs. Cappelletti’s.” (more…)
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