The Pennsylvania State University Board of Trustees elected new leadership Friday at its first meeting since the tumultuous week in November when the board fired Graham B. Spanier, the university’s longtime president, and Joe Paterno, the legendary football coach who died Sunday of lung cancer.
Karen B. Peetz, a trustee who is vice chair of Bank of New York Mellon, was elected as the new chair of the board. Keith E. Masser, a current trustee and president of the farming company Sterman Masser, was elected as vice chair.
Ms. Peetz and Mr. Masser replaced Steve Garban and John Surma as chair and vice chair, respectively. Both Mr. Garban and Mr. Surma had declined to seek re-election, citing the increased time commitments required of them over the past two months.
Ms. Peetz, whose tenure begins immediately, said the board under her leadership will focus on change, reform, and transparency. She called her election as chair “a great honor and privilege,” but “also, particularly now, a great responsibility.”
The board plans to complete a review of its governance structure and consider adopting some of the “best practices” of its peer institutions, Ms. Peetz said.
Faculty, students, and alumni have publicly criticized the board’s handling of the child sex-abuse scandal that broke in November. The Faculty Senate is meeting on Tuesday and has scheduled a vote on a resolution expressing no confidence in the board. The recently formed group Penn State Alumni for the Reorganization of the Board of Trustees also has gathered more than 1,400 signatures online in support of the Faculty Senate resolution and calling for statutory changes in the board’s structure.
Recommendations for Improvement
At the meeting on Friday, the Board of Trustees also adopted five interim recommendations from a panel it has commissioned to look into the scandal.
The investigative task force, led by Louis J. Freeh, a former FBI director and judge, is continuing its work.
Its interim recommendations include strengthening university policies involving minors, promptly reporting incidents involving sexual misconduct, and training personnel on compliance with the Clery Act, a federal law that requires colleges to disclose campus-crime statistics and provide timely notification of public-safety threats. The U.S. Department of Education is investigating whether Penn State violated that law with regard to the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, who is accused of sexually abusing children on the campus.
The panel also recommended that the university hire a chief compliance and ethics officer, and that it bolster the security of its athletic facilities by quickly retrieving keys and access cards from people who are no longer affiliated with the university.
Some people have questioned the independence of Mr. Freeh’s inquiry, including the Faculty Senate, which has called for its own independent investigation.
But Kenneth Frazier, the trustee who is overseeing the external panel’s review, defended the process and emphasized its impartiality several times on Friday.
“They have been directed not to show any favoritism toward the administration or any member of the Board of Trustees,” Mr. Frazier told trustees during the meeting.
The external investigation may take until the beginning of the next academic year, Mr. Frazier said, adding that the board would not impose “artificial timetables” on the process, nor would it “sacrifice thoroughness or compliance for expediency.”
The meeting of the trustees, which was watched by several thousand people on the Internet and had been moved to a larger venue to accommodate members of the public and media, lasted for several hours. It was dominated by matters relating directly to or stemming from the child sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the institution since November. The acting athletic director, David M. Joyner, for instance, reassured trustees that the football program had not lost any new recruits to the scandal and that morale was steadily improving. Mr. Joyner also disclosed that Penn State would be paying out about $4.4-million in severance to six assistant football coaches who were not retained under the new head coach, Bill O’Brien.
But despite the heightened outside interest in Friday’s meeting, the Penn State trustees still had routine business interspersed with scandal-related items on their agenda, and at times shifted quite abruptly between the two. Among the more mundane issues the board addressed were expanding wireless Internet coverage in some Penn State dorm rooms and approving new building projects.
The trustees were also informed that the university was unaffected this year by a rise in peanut prices, because it had stockpiled some of the 20,000 pounds of peanut butter consumed each year on the campus.