Posts filed under ‘Controversy’
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.
The Return of State Patty’s Day
All you need to know about State Patty’s Day can be found at Peoples Nation, the pricy T-shirt shop on College Avenue. The front third of the store features items custom made for the student-organized holiday: Green necklaces with shot glass pendants, green and white feather boas, green sequined oversized leprechaun hats, and shirts with slogans such as “Sorry I’m Not Sorry: State Patty’s Day 2012.”
On Tuesday morning when I stopped by, two female students were waiting as the cashier rang up 20 green pinnies. The total? $290.40.
“They’re for my friends from out of town,” the girl said to her friend as she reached for her credit card. “I’m so excited they’re going to come up. This is going to be the best State Patty’s ever.”
With the context of everything that has occurred at Penn State since November, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is this really time for the best State Patty’s Day ever? Beginning Friday, thousands of Penn State students—and thousands of visitors—will descend upon the streets, bars, and apartments of State College to, well, party. “It’s just a giant drinking holiday, not much more,” junior Brittany Smith said. “It’s just an excuse to drink all day long.”
The holiday has grown immensely since its inception in 2007. Last year, State College Police made a record 234 criminal arrests—up from 160 in 2010—and fielded a record 480 calls. Close to 11,000 people have joined a Facebook group titled “Official Facebook Page: State Patty’s Day 2012.” With that kind of momentum, State Patty’s Day 2012 is slated to be bigger than ever—right?
Maybe.
The image of Penn State students has been scrutinized (more…)
Michael Mann Makes His Case
I approached the podium a few minutes before Michael Mann was scheduled to speak Thursday afternoon to ask him a simple question: Were all those police out front there because of him?
“Probably,” he smiled. “I think they’re probably superfluous, but it’s better to be safe.”
I’ve gone to probably a dozen Penn State Forum lunches in the past five years, and Thursday’s event at the Penn Stater Hotel was the first in which I’d seen a police presence. Three armed campus police officers—one from a K-9 unit—stood outside the packed conference room in which Mann spoke. I imagine they were there to stem any potential unrest after ads appeared on local radio this week urging people to boycott or protest Mann’s speech; I imagine those officers were aware as well that Mann has received death threats because of his work.
Mann, of course, is a climatologist, Penn State professor of meteorology and geosciences, and director of the University’s Earth Systems Science Center. If you know his name, it’s probably less because of his work—including his role in developing the iconic “hockey stick” model for measuring long-term global warming—than the reaction to it. U.S. Senators, state attorneys general, and TV pundits (among many others) have all gone after Mann in an attempt to discredit findings that show the reality and alarming rate of man-made global warming. If he’s not the favorite target of climate change deniers, he’s near the top of the list.
Mann’s speech Thursday was titled (more…)
New Leadership for the Board of Trustees
Karen Peetz took over as chair of the Board of Trustees.
Generally, the January meeting of Penn State’s Board of Trustees is a pretty straightforward affair. There’s a lot of routine business to take care of—choosing meeting dates for the next calendar year, authorizing the president to confer degrees at commencement—and even the more notable items, such as the board electing its officers, tend to be only minimally noteworthy.
Not so Friday, at the board’s first public meeting since the Sandusky scandal.
The meeting was moved from its usual location—the boardroom on the ground floor of the Nittany Lion Inn—to the larger ballroom on the first floor. We in the media got hand-stamped at the door, assuring us entrée into the post-meeting news conference. Milling around outside the inn were alumni with signs supporting “due process for Joe Paterno,” and milling around inside was a larger-than-usual number of police officers.
And although the day started slowly—at one point, the Twitter hashtag #PSUBOT was agog over the revelation that Penn State had purchased 20,000 pounds of peanut butter in anticipation of a rise in peanut prices, interesting but hardly the key news everyone was waiting for—by the end, there was plenty of news to digest:
—Steve Garban ’59 stepped down as the chair of the board, and John Surma ’76—who made the announcement that Paterno and president Graham Spanier were gone—stepped down as the vice chair. (Garban and Surma will remain on the board; they simply gave up leadership positions.)
—The board elected new leaders. The chair is Karen Peetz ’77, vice chairman and CEO of financial markets and treasury services of the Bank of New York Mellon, who was elected by the board as a representative of business and industry in 2010. The vice chair is Keith Masser ’73, chairman and CEO of Sterman Masser Inc., a family farm, and who was elected by agricultural societies in 2008. Each ran unopposed. (more…)
Why Child Sexual Abuse Goes Unreported: A Sociologist Explains
“Everybody likes to think they would be the whistleblower. What I told my class was this: Statistically, you’re full of crap.” —Eric Silver
Of the 28 pages of essays we published in our January/February issue, which we devoted to the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath, none has received more responses than Eric Silver’s. Silver, a professor of sociology and crime, law, and justice, contributed a piece we titled “Bureaucracy, Loyalty, and Truth.”
We introduced the piece like this: “Everyone says they’d report suspected child abuse to the authorities, but most don’t. A Penn State sociologist dissects the powerful forces that prevent us from doing so.”
Silver’s perspective—based largely on his specialty, the sociology of deviance, and a class lecture he gave just days after the charges against Sandusky were filed—really struck a chord with readers. Because of the large response, we’ve decided to make the piece available here. —Lori Shontz, senior editor
I teach a class in the sociology of deviance, and we were covering the topic of adult-child sexual contact when this happened. The students had a homework assignment related to it due the night before all this broke. It was an eerie thing.
I felt like I needed to say something in class—to put the crisis in a sociological context. Two ideas came to me—one is bureaucracy, and the second is loyalty.
Everything in our world is organized by bureaucracies. You go to the grocery store, and your food’s always there, it’s on the shelves—that’s a very complex task, and it’s organized by a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are very good at complex tasks, because they break up those tasks into small pieces that individuals can be responsible for. We’re all familiar with that in our own work lives: If we run into trouble, we tell so-and-so, and that’s it. It’s off our plate, and we continue to do what we’re supposed to do.
In this case, I don’t know the facts any more than anybody else does, but it seems as though there was reporting upward, which most of the time you’re encouraged to do. The big question is: Why didn’t people follow up after they reported upward? In some ways, it’s not a fair question. Our job descriptions aren’t to police our bosses.
I realize that everybody likes to think they would be the whistleblower. They are the ones who would risk their job, their livelihood, their future, their letters of recommendation. This belief fuels our righteous indignation at those involved. What I told my class was this: Statistically, you’re full of crap. For every 1,000 people, you’re lucky if there are two or three whistleblowers. (more…)
Alumni Ask Questions; President Erickson Answers
Rodney Erickson and moderator Patty Satalia took questions from Pittsburgh-area Penn State alumni for about 90 minutes on Tuesday night.
Rodney Erickson promised “openness and communication.” He promised them twice, in fact, during his opening statement Wednesday night at a town hall meeting with alumni in Pittsburgh. He called those values his “guiding principles and watchwords,” ones he learned growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, and he said they’ve served him well during his career in higher education, the past 34 years at Penn State and the past nine weeks as the University’s president.
“I know there’s a perception that we at Penn State have not always done as well as we could to be open, to respond to questions and to be as transparent as possible with all of our constituencies—alumni, faculty, staff, our students, and the public and the media who report on our great university,” he said. “We will do better in the future based on those guiding principles of openness and communication that I just stated. I’m here this evening to begin to demonstrate these values.”
He promised, also, to listen to whatever the more than 600 alumni who attended the town hall had to say about the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath. (And anything else.) Those alumni took Erickson at his word. They were polite, but they didn’t hold back.
The first speaker introduced herself by saying that she’d brought her baby daughter and son home from the hospital in Penn State sleepers “because (more…)
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