In Spanier Case, College Leadership Goes on Trial

Jason Minick, AP Images

It all comes down to this.

After five years of vigorously denying charges that he had covered up the crimes of a convicted serial pedophile, Graham B. Spanier finally faces a jury of his peers this week. The trial of Mr. Spanier, the former president of Pennsylvania State University, will be a high-stakes criminal proceeding seldom, if ever, visited upon an academic leader of such national stature. At long last, Mr. Spanier will either clear his name in court or face a public reckoning that could send him to prison.

The trial, which begins on Monday with jury selection in Dauphin County Court, hinges on whether Mr. Spanier conspired with fellow administrators to conceal the crimes of Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted, in 2012, on 45 counts related to child molestation. The charges against Mr. Spanier include two counts of endangering the welfare of children and one count of criminal conspiracy, all third-degree felonies that each carry a maximum penalty of seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

The Sandusky scandal has proved to be an albatross for Penn State, long embroiled in the costly legal fallout, and a remarkable fall from grace for Mr. Spanier personally. In his 16 years as president, Mr. Spanier was often regarded in academic circles as a model executive, accumulating great collegial esteem and considerable wealth at the helm of one of the nation’s elite public research institutions. His high national profile has made all the more striking Mr. Spanier’s years in virtual exile, banished from Penn State classrooms, ducking most interviews, and filing periodic lawsuits against those he says have besmirched his reputation.

The personal stakes for Mr. Spanier are only part of the story of this trial. From the beginning, the alleged misdeeds of Penn State’s former president have been entwined with the culture of the institution that prosecutors say he sought to protect at the expense of children. Fairly or not, the case against Mr. Spanier has always been, at least in part, a referendum on the college-athletics industrial complex, the defense of which prosecutors say clouded the judgment and basic decency of administrators confronted with evidence of abuse. Mr. Spanier has flatly denied that he ever heard any details of Mr. Sandusky sexually abusing boys, much less covered them up.

“It’s a very ugly trial theme,” says L. George Parry, a former prosecutor now in private practice in Philadelphia. “You have this football factory out at Penn State that is producing millions and millions of dollars for the university as well as nationwide recognition, and the basic argument here is that these uncaring administrators, in order to protect that franchise, turned their backs on child abuse being committed by part of that football machine. That’s about as ugly as it gets. The prosecution is going to have a field day with that theme, and it’s going to be a very tough slog for Mr. Spanier.”

Mr. Spanier is among a trio of Penn State administrators who were charged with covering up Mr. Sandusky’s crimes, but in court the former president will stand alone. Timothy M. Curley, Penn State’s former athletics director, and Gary C. Schultz, a former vice president, last week pleaded guilty to charges of child endangerment and failure to report abuse. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the more-serious felony charge of conspiracy.

It is unclear whether Mr. Curley and Mr. Schultz agreed to testify against Mr. Spanier as part of their plea agreements. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office will not discuss the case in any detail.

“Assuming part of the plea deal is they’re going to testify for the commonwealth, that’s bad news for Mr. Spanier,” Mr. Parry says.

That said, prosecutors face a high bar in proving their case. For the two charges of child endangerment to stick, the commonwealth will have to show that Mr. Spanier knowingly put children at risk and prevented or interfered with the delivery of a report of suspected child abuse. That “very inflammatory charge,” Mr. Parry says, is typically leveled at a family member of the abuser, not the chief executive of a large organization.

Child-endangerment laws were similarly used in the prosecution of Msgr. William J. Lynn, the first Roman Catholic Church official in the United States convicted of covering up sexual abuse by priests. That conviction was later overturned.

‘Horsing Around’

The case against Mr. Spanier, at least as publicly known thus far, is messy, reliant on time-worn recollections by administrators and obliquely worded emails. It amounts to an archaeological dig into the business of a university administration, analyzing well after the fact how the most-powerful men at Penn State did their jobs, managed risk, and prioritized the safety and welfare of children.

Much will depend on the jury’s assessment of what Mr. Spanier was told, in 2001, about Mr. Sandusky’s interaction with a young boy in Penn State’s football building. Mike McQueary, a football graduate assistant, has testified that, after observing Mr. Sandusky molest a boy in the locker-room showers, he told Mr. Curley and Mr. Schultz that he had witnessed something “extremely sexual” and “some kind of intercourse.” Mr. Spanier has testified he was told only that Mr. Sandusky had been “horsing around” with the boy.

The incident was not reported to authorities. Instead, according to an independent investigation commissioned by Penn State’s trustees, Mr. Spanier went along with a plan to tell Mr. Sandusky that he needed professional help, to forbid him from bringing children into Penn State facilities, and to report the incident to the Second Mile, a charity for underprivileged youth where Mr. Sandusky groomed his victims. Emails from that period, which were included in a report on the university-commissioned investigation, suggest that Mr. Spanier understood the risks of handling the matter quietly.

Penn State Scandal

This selection of articles from The Chronicle’s archives looks back on the Jerry Sandusky scandal and its fallout at Pennsylvania State University.

• With Last-Minute Ruling, Graham Spanier Evades Jumpsuit and ‘Hard Cell’
• Seeking Closure in Verdict, Penn State Finds More Discord
• Spanier’s Conviction Highlights Lessons of Sandusky Scandal
• Guilty Verdict Puts a Dark Coda on Spanier’s Fall

“The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and then we become vulnerable for having not reported it,” Mr. Spanier wrote to Mr. Curley and Mr. Schultz. “But that can be assessed down the road. The approach you outline is a humane and a reasonable way to proceed.”

Mr. Spanier, whose lawyer did not make him available for comment, told The New York Times Magazine in 2014 that he regretted using the word “vulnerable,” which could be interpreted to mean that Mr. Spanier knew something criminal or inappropriate had occurred.

“I didn’t,” Mr. Spanier assured the magazine. “I think what it meant was that if he didn’t get the message and stop bringing boys into the locker rooms, we could be open to criticism. Obviously, in retrospect, using the word was a bad choice. But who would think that 13 years later, someone would focus in on that one word?”

The former president went on to say that his meetings on the Sandusky matter were brief, coming amid a flood of other university business.

“The life of a university president is you have things coming at you all day long,” he said. “It’s one crisis after another, one issue after another.”

The Modern College Leader

Irrespective of Mr. Spanier’s criminal liability, his handling of what turned out to be a profound tragedy is a cautionary tale that illustrates the gravity of administrative decision-making.

“The Penn State story is Exhibit A of the precarious nature of university leadership in this time,” says Stanley O. Ikenberry, a friend of Mr. Spanier’s and a former president of the University of Illinois system.

Mr. Ikenberry is among a host of Mr. Spanier’s professional acquaintances, friends, and colleagues who continue to hold the former Penn State president in high regard. As a scholar of higher education, Mr. Ikenberry sees in his friend’s travails a portrait of the modern college leader, besieged by information and forced to make fast decisions under tremendous public scrutiny. With the benefit of hindsight, Mr. Ikenberry says, some of those decisions are bound not to look good.

“Eventually we will learn more about all of this,” says Mr. Ikenberry, who lives part time in State College, Pa. “The Graham Spanier I know is a person of considerable ability, but also a person of considerable humanity. I saw that before, during his presidency, and I’ve seen it afterward. He’s a person of character and compassion.”

Mr. Spanier is a family sociologist and a family therapist, who studied children over the course of his academic career. He has said that, as a child, he was physically abused by his father, making it all the more “unfathomable” that he would turn a blind eye to anyone harming a child.

The former president’s personal story and defense deeply contrast with the narrative put forward at the time of Mr. Spanier’s indictment, when Pennsylvania’s then-attorney general cast him as part of a “conspiracy of silence by top officials to actively conceal the truth.”

Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University, says Mr. Spanier’s case represents a ratcheting up of accountability for college leaders nationally. On a range of issues, including campus shootings and sexual assault, legal efforts are increasingly being made to hold college presidents personally responsible for wrongdoing that takes place on their watch. But Mr. Spanier’s trial is exemplary in its severity and scope, Mr. Lake says.

Within higher education, Mr. Lake says, “this is the biggest white-collar-crime trial we’ve faced in a quarter-century.”

“The credibility of college leadership,” he says, “stands on trial.”

Not long ago, Mr. Spanier’s resignation or dismissal might have been enough to satisfy the public, Mr. Lake says. But higher education no longer enjoys such deference.

“There was a time when, if you walked in as Dean Wormer, you could have committed war crimes and walked out of the courthouse” unscathed, says Mr. Lake, referring to a character in Animal House. “I think those days are gone.”

Closure Remains Elusive

Six years ago this month The Patriot-News first reported that Mr. Sandusky was the subject of a grand-jury investigation into charges of sexual abuse. The case drew international attention, in no small part because it raised questions about what the late Joe Paterno, the Nittany Lions’ legendary head football coach, knew of his longtime assistant’s crimes and whether Mr. Paterno could have done more to stop to the abuse sooner. Mr. Paterno was never criminally charged, and he died two months after Mr. Sandusky’s arrest.

For Penn State, Mr. Spanier’s trial is another public reminder of the darkest chapter in the institution’s history and a sobering affirmation that the scandal still has life in it. Mr. Sandusky, who is serving 30 to 60 years in prison, is appealing his conviction; Mr. Spanier has filed civil lawsuits against Penn State and against Louis J. Freeh, the former FBI director who led the university-commissioned investigation; and the sentencings of Mr. Curley and Mr. Schultz are still to come.

Eric J. Barron, Penn State’s president, sees Mr. Spanier’s trial as one step of many toward moving beyond the abuse scandal.

“In many ways this is movement toward closure, finally, after a considerable period of time,” Mr. Barron said in an interview last week.

But closure is an elusive thing.

Some members of Penn State’s Board of Trustees remain convinced that the university has never honestly reckoned with what went wrong, and instead rushed to scapegoat its own administrators and beloved football coach. A group of board members who have questioned the findings of the Freeh investigation successfully sued the university for the right to inspect the materials upon which Mr. Freeh based his report. The trustees are now in the process of reviewing an estimated 3.5 million related documents and interview notes.

The board’s post-mortem is just one more way in which the Sandusky scandal continues to divide the university’s leaders and to consume time, energy, and emotion.

“It wears on you,” says Robert Capretto, a university trustee. “It wears on you. I’m tough, but if I told you it didn’t wear on you, I’d be lying.”

The financial toll alone has been dizzying. The university estimates that its legal fees, settlements with victims, fines, and crisis-communications consultants have cost roughly $240 million. Included in that running tally are legal fees for Mr. Spanier, an indemnified employee whose criminal defense is being covered by Penn State.

Mr. Spanier remains a tenured faculty member, but has been on paid administrative leave since November 2012. After he was fired as president, his contract entitled him to a one-year paid sabbatical at his presidential salary of $700,000, followed by five years of a salary of $600,000 per year, an arrangement that ends in November. It will be up to Penn State’s faculty, Mr. Barron says, to decide Mr. Spanier’s future status within its ranks.

“It is what it is,” says Mr. Capretto, who joined the board in 2015. “We paid people millions and millions of dollars. We did what we thought was the right thing to do, and those decisions were cast in stone. I can’t be critical of it. That was the decision that was made, and there was a reasoning behind it in contracts.

“Life’s not perfect. It’s just the way the system is,” he continues. “I want to get over this. Please.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.