The conduct of Penn State’s Board of Trustees on and subsequent to November 2011 has raised serious questions about their judgment and diligence. Their conflicting stories about the NCAA sanctions and the charter of the Freeh Group reduces their credibility even further.
President Rodney Erickson said he accepted the, in my opinion, illegitimate NCAA sanctions because the NCAA threatened him with a four-year death penalty for the football program.
As reported by the Reading Eagle, however, Ed Ray, president of the NCAA’s executive committee, said the death penalty was never on the table.
I believe the mutually exclusive veracities of Erickson and the NCAA’s stories make it the duty of the trustees to either fire Erickson or else invoke the full weight of Penn State’s legal resources against the NCAA.
The trustees’ failure to do that shows a genuine lack of institutional control at this university; nobody is minding the store. Trustees Mark Dambly and Ken Frazier are meanwhile on record as saying that the Board hired the Freeh Group to find out “who knew what, when” about Sandusky, while Trustee Chairwoman Karen Peetz said more recently that Freeh was hired “so that we could have a set of recommendations for how we could improve our governance.” Is Chairwoman of the Board Karen Peetz now telling us — contrary to Dambly’s and Frazier’s stories — that the Freeh Group exceeded the scope of its mission by assigning blame for Sandusky to identifiable Penn State employees?
William A. Levinson
Class of 1978
